Moths & Locusts/Red Herring
Moths & Locusts
Exoplanets // NoiseAgonyMayhem Records
Moths and Locusts. Both can fly, both are transformational, both signify progress. Nanaimo's Moths & Locusts are celebrating 10 years of progressive space rock exploration with Exoplanets.
Exoplanets, the sextet's fourth long playing album is a distillation of three separate recording sessions across Canada.
"Cocaine Kangaroo" is an uptempo driving excercise introduction. "Genghis Khan" drones on with flourishing flute accents and minor key vocals haunting a space rock jam. "Nero's Surgery" is a short accessible interlude. "A Ram Named Drama" has a tense build backdropped with atmospheric swirling sonic textures. "Avulsion" finds the band stripping down to put down a straightforward psych rock ripper. "Exoplanets", the album's centrepiece, finds Moths & Locusts flexing all muscles. It is a sprawling tour through a myriad of emotion and landscape. Over 15 minutes is used to come to a thrilling and progressive conclusion. "Fresh Red Blood" serves as the calming cooldown to the sonic psych journey.
With Exoplanets, Moths & Locusts are more than ready to carry on their existential travels into a second decade.
- Drew Cox
Red Herring
Neon // Independent
After a thirty year hiatus from performing and writing music as a band, Vancouver-based art rockers Red Herring have made a striking comeback with their new release, titled Neon. Formed in the early eighties, the band won CiTR’s first ever Shindig! Battle of the Bands at Vancouver’s Savoy nightclub, released their only other EP, Taste Tests, and toured across Canada in ‘86 before being “lost in the fog” shortly after, as co-founder and songwriter for the project Enrico Renz puts it.
Since going their own ways musically, Renz has enjoyed a long career as a grade 5 teacher, and fellow co-founder Stephen Nikleva has continued to record and perform with an impressive array of musicians, as well as put out his own solo album in 2015. Since re-forming in 2013 with its original four members, the band has added two new members and has continued to perform and record, enjoying their return and reconnecting with their earlier fanbase.
Neon, like the band’s first release, Taste Tests, features a refreshing weirdness and poignancy of songwriting evocative of the Talking Heads and early Clash. Jumpy guitar and bass riffs abound on this project and entwined with Renz’ clear headed and energetic vocals the overall sound of the project is engaging, to say the least. “The Brain Song”, the first single off the project, is the perfect introduction to Red Herring’s energy and writing style. Renz sings from the perspective of a brain that is “trapped inside the skull”, only able to experience the world second-hand through the senses and unable to escape. That is, of course, with the exception of sex, when the brain is able to fully experience another brain: “plunging just like garbage down a chute”. The title track for this project, “Neon,” maintains the band’s singular style, but perhaps takes itself a little more seriously. The song paints a surreal cityscape with grandiose organ, minimalist vocals, and a spooky chorus, chanting the word “neon”.
The second half changes lanes to become more folk and blues oriented, showcasing what is likely Renz and Nikleva’s experimentation with different genres and matured taste since Taste Tests. This latter half kicks off with the tape’s second single, “Julia,” a haunting ballad that begs a girl named Julia to “sail the seven seas” and leave her things behind, supported by ethereal vocals from the bands second vocalist, Tanya Gosgnatch. The tape comes to a strong end with the bluesy “Shaker,” in which Renz applies his fun and subtly poignant songwriting to an ode to a woman who really knows how to use a shaker, complete with references to preachers and Santana-esque guitar riffs.
All in all, Red Herring’s comeback simultaneously showcases and revamps the bands early sound which clearly hasn’t lost any of it’s direction in the intervening years, and builds on the legacy of the band’s members with new musical directions that contribute to the well-roundedness of the tape. Old fans and new listeners alike will not be disappointed by this project, whose sound has remained innovative and musically solid despite the time that has passed since Red Herring’s inception.
- Devon Acuña
