The last few years have not been easy for the indispensable noiserap project Moodie Black, as Kristen Martinez herself admits: for her, everything fell apart in the wake of the 2022 tour with Puscifer, leading to numerous personal and musical upheavals. Having released four albums in under ten years, Moodie Black is now a solo project, and All Natural, Moodie Black finally follows on from the 2020 album Fuzz. In the meantime, the collection of previously unreleased tracks eating my past and the EP MBIV had given us some reassuring signs of life amidst the silence. Well, ‘reassuring’… On All Natural, Moodie Black, whose release date remains a secret (though we’re expecting a second single on 28 August), the track titles are all written in lower case, as if even the typography were in mourning and had no reason toshow off.
After all this time and with such a background, you wouldn’t expect to be dancing merrily. flame resistant girls sets the tone: haunting layers, a hypnotic rhythm repeated tirelessly to the point of alienation, strange noise-driven torments, percussion that brings its merciless coldness, and, over it all, Martinez’s deep, incantatory voice—a blend of contained menace, resilience, irony and melancholy (the epic warm for you or the raw to my friends, oozing with despair, or la pt. iii with its dark intensity). Little by little, the nightmare thickens, a grey, opaque fog that lets through only the rarest glimmers of light, like a hope one dares to glimpse. No, you really won’t be dancing.
In its sombre, mournful weight, All Natural, Moodie Black has a liturgical quality to it – a cathartic litany filled with bitterness. The words fall and cause pain, only to heal all the more. Moodie Black’s industrial experimentation serves to accentuate this alchemical quality, this sense of witnessing the transformation of a dark, primal substance made of suffering into something spiritual and beautiful, like the birth of a new skin. Filth sublimated through a twisted, tortured sound that Martinez allows to linger like the echoes of wounds that are still bleeding.
We then make our way through this album as if losing ourselves in a hallucinatory mist, as the whole thing gradually starts to feel like an intimate ritual where settling of scores, introspection and psychedelia intermingle (much like the dissonant trip that is verde valley white, Moodie Black draws us into a cacophony that is at times surreal, culminating in shove your children – a mutating, anxiety-inducing climax). We appreciate the talent for imbuing the cold, mechanical machines with a visceral presence, whilst Kristen Martinez keeps us spellbound by her words. Despite the sincerity and the absence of artificial gimmicks, there is at times a theatrical touch, such as the suspense maintained within the stories told by the artist-narrator (the static tree).
Moodie Black’s comeback is not an easy listen. All Natural, Moodie Black is a long, sombre and intimate trance, as fascinating as it is unsettling. Through their layered sounds and repetitions, the machines take on a mystical quality: there is a magic here born of suffering and the scorching mirages of Arizona, of guts torn apart and laid bare, but above all, musical experiences that are always in the service of emotion. Whilst Kristen Martinez’s sorrows and doubts gave life to this sublime monster, we nevertheless hope she will now find peace: we have faith in her talent to ensure that the future looks more serene (though still very dark!) for Moodie Black.
