Artist: Moebius Cat
Label: MALS Ltd.
Release date: 2010
Running time: 56:55
Rating: 3.8/5
Moebius Cat – the band’s name alone grabs your attention. And that attention only grows with every new thing you discover about them. Even their debut album Arrivals-Departures, released in 2003, has an incredibly interesting concept, stretching from the listener’s first contact with the sleeve, with its kind of transcendental image, all the way to actually listening to the music. Music that, once again, is not only worth your attention but your praise too.
So with their very first record, the Canadian eclectics created a sort of genre-transcending image of their take on musical art, even though they always plant themselves on the furthest edge of progressive rock in the broadest sense – in the sense of constant exploration, persistence and progress. Their second album followed a whole 7 years later – in Russia, on the Russian label MALS, where the band has had the most success anyway, which is certainly a surprising fact. Plenty of Russian musicians appear on both albums, too.
Seven years is a long time, especially right after a band has only just introduced itself and shown a sliver of what every successful and, even better, quality band on the music scene needs. But the Russians (and everyone else) didn’t forget. And the band’s second album End of Time gave them exactly what those who had kept following the band were hoping for.
End of Time is really an incredible conglomerate of musical styles, modes of expression and genres. Maybe even too much for its own good. In under an hour, End of Time tries to tell and show 7 years of creating. 7 years of building expectations, 7 years of musicians keeping their mouths shut, 7 years of potential time to put out several albums. Maybe that’s exactly why some songs feel a bit incoherent or not quite nailed down in terms of arrangement, even though, interestingly, the best-sounding track is the closing one, »Waltz With A Vampire«, which is completely instrumental. Before that, though, Moebius Cat try everything – swapping and layering female and male vocals in all kinds of styles, letting the dark goth synth atmosphere loose sometimes in line with the technical madness of progressive rock, other times just as a mood-maker, electronic elements popping up at random but in the spirit of experimental freedom, and the occasional instrument unusual for rock, with ethnic melodies at the most unexpected and often inappropriate spots, twisting and breaking the melody’s red thread.
Such an attempt at cramming in too many elements from different musical styles is hard to compose into a coherent, sensible whole. Moebius Cat probably know that themselves. Not that they don’t pull it off – they often do. But when they don’t, it’s really distracting, since it also knocks down some genuinely good concepts along the way. All in the spirit of experimentation, maybe.
End of Time is thus more than an interesting release – like everything about this otherwise mysterious band, it’s worth your attention. It’s an unconventional approach to music, and certainly the driving force of true, non-recycled progressive rock that shrugs off genre clichés of every stripe. The success varies accordingly, since this is only the band’s second record, far more experimental than the more coherent debut, which is surely the right direction for making advanced music – and with the right balance between experimentation and a sense of composition, wider recognition is surely waiting for Moebius Cat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVDwtR4OZG8
(the full album is available for free on the band’s website)
Lineup
Roman Bershadsky – keyboards, vocals, djembe, drums, bass guitar, percussion, lyrics
David Graham – lyrics
Jodi Krangle, Karl Mohr, Adriano Spina – vocals
Terry Skirko – drums, tabla
Derek Wylie – guitars
Andrei Stebakov – acoustic guitar
Jeremy Wheaton – bass guitar
Michael Gutman – bass guitar
Ashot Ovanessian – violin
Roman M – violin, flute, guitar
Track list
01. I’ve Been Losing 4:04
02. End of Time 5:57
03. Better Days Than These 4:54
04. Time Enough for Love 4:47
05. Cold Rain 4:46
06. Fairwell Guru 4:34
07. It’s Over 4:54
08. River 3:56
09. Learning to Fly 4:48
10. Dance Goes On 5:10
11. Parallel Dimensions 4:32
12. Waltz With a Vampire 4:33
