Style: Neoclassical darkwave (Clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Björk, Lingua Ignota, Anna von Hausswolff
Country: United Kingdom
Release date: 21 February 2025
The approach to intimate topics in music is as varied as musicians themselves. Artists such as The Mars Volta like to bury their ideas under layers of symbolism, urging listeners to pry deeper and piece lyrics together themselves, while artists like Mount Eerie couldn’t be any more direct in their painfully raw prose. Maud the Moth, moniker of Scottish composer and healthyliving vocalist Amaya López-Carramero, aims for a balance of these two approaches on latest release The Distaff, exploring her emotions in a way that is at times arcane and at other times steamrolls the listener with powerfully blunt sentiment. Does her brand of lyricism reach through to the listener, or does The Distaff leave us spinning up our own interpretations into wool?
A sharp surrealist bent envelops The Distaff’s neoclassical darkwave, manifesting through López-Carramero’s use of voice effects (“Canto de Enramada”), abrasive industrial sounds (“Exuviae”, “A Temple by the River”), and morphing, non-linear song structures (“Despeñaperros”). A pithy elevator speech for the album would probably say something like ‘a soul-bearing operatic recital set in the middle of a fever dream’. Most tracks indulge in loungey, serpentine piano swirling around López-Carramero’s extensive vocal range, reaching powerful climaxes that tap into heavy and doomy guitar distortion. At other times, the piano channels an otherworldly atmosphere and tonality similar to that found in Alora Crucible.
In the opening moments of “Canta de Enramadas”, juxtaposition is established as a central songwriting tenet: López-Carramero’s operatic, howling, and vocoder-laden performance counters the amorphous and swirling electronic backdrop in a way that terrifies yet feels utterly relatable in its intensity and pain. Later, “Exuviae” features tweeting birds and piano flourishes that are intermittently carved through by wailing industrial noises, conveying an impassioned search for pastoral catharsis that is haunted by the harsh and abusive machinations of mankind. López-Carramero takes virtually every opportunity to set up ideas of ‘polarity’, utilizing her stunning vocal range and a bevy of textures to paint compositions in a stark gray.
Juxtaposition is even evoked in The Distaff’s lyricism. Verses are wont to oscillate between crystal-clear mental imagery and inscrutable symbolism while still retaining an intimate feel. Lines like ‘Kindred bodies dissolve / Dehooved and mute in the barn’ from “Fiat Lux” and ‘Bewildered, he entered the bodies of both of them / Poisoned vine / And the ditch chokes the vine / Black plague at the root’1 from “Canto de Enramada” recall the visceral uncanniness found in, for example, The Mars Volta’s Frances the Mute. On the flip side, “A Temple by the River” repeatedly calls out ‘My body is not enough’ in woeful capitulation, a striking and heartbreakingly concrete lament, while “Exuviae” proclaims ‘Inside me there’s a crack / Where the light can never reach’, heavily infusing The Distaff with sentiments of inadequacy and unworthiness.
Despite the relative simplicity of its compositions, The Distaff showcases a remarkable density in its winding Impressionist ideas. The waxing and waning of “Despeñaperros” is undoubtedly cinematic, bringing together dramatic doomy climaxes and plaintive piano through a narrative of death and change. Whereas “Despeñaperros” wanders far from its beginnings, “A Temple by the River” takes a more circular approach, returning to its home idea after a dramatic string-led adventure through marsh and prairie. While this is by and large a positive for The Distaff, pieces like “Burial of the Patriarchs” wander a bit too much, its individual parts pleasant but difficult to follow. When paired with dense and cryptic lyricism, it’s easy to completely lose your footing and be pulled out of the experience entirely for a moment. Additionally, some tracks unsatisfyingly stay in the same place for too long: “Siphonophores”, for example, sits in a lilting piano idea for most of its duration that leaves too little to grab onto or follow, even with the inclusion of its harsh industrial flourishes and decent climax near the end.
Occasionally challenging and always dense, The Distaff is a work that revels wholly in juxtaposition. Amaya López-Carromero is eager to evoke a deeply personal internal sorrow but reticent to reveal it all at once, casting a shroud through surreal-yet-intimate imagery and Impressionist-yet-heavily-textured songwriting. Many of The Distaff’s passages feel borne of something wholly inhuman and yet still manage to effortlessly strike at the soul through a clever balance of dreamlike intangibility and material prosody. Though its ideas occasionally get lost in themselves and leave little for the listener to glean, The Distaff is willing to open itself up to you as much as you open yourself to it.
Recommended tracks: A Temple by the River, Despeñaperros, Exuviae, Fiat Lux
You may also like: Ophelia Sullivan, Mingjia, Alora Crucible, healthyliving
Final verdict: 7.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Independent
Maud the Moth is:
– Amaya López-Carromero (vocals, piano, psaltery, percussion)
– Scott McLean (guitar, moog, saxophone)
– Sebastian Rochford (drums)
– Alison Chesley (cello)
– Fay Guiffo (violin)
- This is a rough translation from Spanish. Here are the original lyrics: ‘Fuera de si, se adentró en el cuerpo de las dos / Sarmiento envenenado / Y la acequia ahoga la vid / Peste negra en la raíz’ ↩︎
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