Moodie Black, the cosmic punkrock witch dream of rapper/producer/poetess K-Death and guitarist/sound warlock Sean Lindhal, isn’t out to push rap’s boundaries– no, they are in fact lighting a barbed-wire and nails infused molotov cocktail at the gates and slow-mo walking away as the towers of rap’s perceptions crumble into ash, leaving ancient sigils and totems in the wake of the destruction. Moodie Black’s music is a swirling blast of both chaos and calm, where sonic entropy and stasis meet in the warp of a black hole. They’re a rap band infused with gothic shamanism; they’re a noise band that eschews the hedonistic pathology of so-called noise music when they conjure darkness and not so much through the expected nihilism but in celebration and catharsis.

FUZZ is their new record continuing the strange cacophonous tones of their decade’s long career-defining epic Lucas Acid and the sub-sequent eps MBIII and MBIII.IV MICHOA. Here on FUZZ, Moodie Black stretches and twists their sound into bouncy post-punk screeds like “Hi. V”, where a trance-like atonal bassline cuts through a Cybertronian dance beat and K’s rhymes illuminate the anger of being trapped in a marginalized body, and on cyberpunk anti-love screeds like “I’m the One to Love” where slow, autotronic beats create a Bladerunner-esque atmosphere. On “Picket Fence” the band offers a dizzying, blackened braggadocio-ladden annihilation on Columbusing gatekeepers and other sycophants, with lyrics and hooks that cut through some of K’s deepest, most layered production where sad guitars echo in watery, dream-induced remorse. FUZZ is the perfect amalgamation of the beautiful and the strange, of the damaged and the blissful. It will be impossible to decide if heads, on first listen, will want to storm their nearest governmental facility with Uzis and slingshots or sit in a dark, empty room with candle and sage and contemplate the machinations of the darker worlds within. FUZZ is mean, unflinching, and incendiary and quite possibly Moodie Black’s noisiest record to date– it would have to be in a world where major label and mainstream artists are injecting aggro sounds and hints of noise on their aspirational club jams; and yet, FUZZ is also Moodie’s most engaging work. Where Lucas saw a witch coming into her own, casting spells and conjuring a universe, FUZZ is the result of that conjuring– a wild, genre-bending explosion of cinematic cyborg sound ripping that universe apart. – Alex Smith
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