“is a triumphant return to the desert where the band was created. The more realized version of a sound the band has since moved beyond. Something else entirely.”
Moodie Black is the band name of experimental rap artist Kristen Martinez and All Natural, Moodie Black is the first new music from the band in six years. It’s an album built from the heat of the Verde Valley, Arizona, and fuelled by the turbulence of wild, and broken relationships, discrimination, survival, and the loss of best friend and former Moodie Back guitarist Sean Lindahl.
If you talk to anyone who runs a music blog, website or magazine they will tell you that they live for the moment when they are sifting through submissions and get stopped in their tracks by an artist that makes their Spider-sense tingle. Exactly what happened when heard the tracks ‘to my friends’ and ‘warm for you’. As a result, Joyzine got to premiere ‘warm for you’ of which I said, ‘Field recordings and feedback swirl like a tornado in a gravel pit before tectonic drums start pounding relentlessly. A low guitar warps in the background joined by an out of tune riff that worms its way into your ears. Pleasure and pain side by side…and it’s glorious!’
To me I think rap needed to go on a journey from its street roots in no-money-cobbled-together-vinyl-looping-two-deck-and-a-mixer-invention, through global dominance, big money, big business, before ultimately spawning ‘experimental’ and ‘noise-rap’; something combative and in-your-face to reflect the chaos of modern life. The light and dark of a track like ‘to my friends’ pushes your listening powers to the limit with low pulsing rap verses, all brooding and laced with peril, juxtaposed with waves of near-impenetrable feedback, screamed vocals, and guitars in pain. Jarring though this can be, it is far from unlistenable: it is invigorating.
Lyrics are raw and uncompromising with language being pushed and pulled between unsettling truth and jagged poetic allusion. Some passages are blunt objects that call out the haters whereas others warp meaning and rough-and-tumble with words like trying to wrestle and quote poetry at the same time:
“THE MEANING OF MY PLANET IS THE TEARS AT THE FRINGE / CAUSE ANY MINUTE THAT IM LIVING IM AWARE OF THE END / SO IM ENAMORED WITH THE PATTERNS AND IM GLAD IM NOT CIS / CAUSE IMA LIVE IT LIKE A TRANNY WITH THE MEAT ON MY FISTS / AND IM A SHOT UP MODERN BLOT BAD STAINED PROBLEM / IN A TALL GLASS DEEP WITH A LACE STEEPED HONOR THIS IS KAYFABE” – ‘to my friends’.
“The big bad grab my hand burns into glass flash with your mass on my back i am never mad, I pay in sad wish fist with a tense wrist fits in a calm room quick where no one sits, Still but my heart skips run to the last forest, Moodie the loudest static tree. And you still ignore us” – ‘the static tree’
There are many themes covered on All Natural, Moodie Black that are far away from my own experience of life, but the power of the medium combined with the message help me go some way to inhabit the turbulent world of Kristen Martinez, and that counts for a lot. This is an album full of chiaroscuro concepts, bruising language, cacophony, and harsh beauty but similar to being caught in a punishing rainstorm, it is utterly exhilarating.
Moodie Black: Bandcamp | Instagram | YouTube
Review by Paul F Cook
Keep up to date with all new content on Joyzine via our
Facebook | Bluesky | Instagram | Threads | Mailing List