Having just tried to unpick and process Jeremy Moore’s more avant-garde project, Bell Barrow, The Ones Who Love from Zero Swann, another of his musical outlets, feels almost like a lightening the load. It’s all relative, I guess.
There is still a sense that he is all about pushing boundaries, but the ones he is trying to redefine here are at least more recognisable. Here we still find him toying with the demarcations and boundaries that lie on the far fringes of goth, no-wave, psychedelia, darkwave, and metal, and if the previous album, Benefactor, felt aggressively in your face, now the music feels less so, more content to carry you along in its wake rather than sucker-punch you with its presence.
Opener “Chrisom” is claustrophobic and full of gnashing, angular slices, yet never abandons a sense of dark melody and diabolical groove… in the sense of being something of demonic proportions rather than hellish to listen to. Although some might argue so, this is not music out to make friends or pander to comfortable expectations.
“White Lips” is a threshing machine of groove, one that runs on scything sonics and mechanical rhythms, blending engineered energy yet human intensity, while the title track tries to gallop but is weighted down with searing sound and doom-laden yet beguiling interludes, and “Only Sorrow” is creatively caustic.
Jeremy Moore displays a voice that is surprising, sitting somewhere between the anthemic rock boom of Glen Danzig and the beautiful baritone of Dead Can Dance’s Brendan Perry. A sound both surprising, given the experimental nature of his music, and yet totally fitting.
The Ones Who Love sits on the cusp of familiarity and experimentation, nostalgia and adventure, at once echoing the darkwave pioneers of the late seventies and offering a taste of a dark musical future we would be fools not to embrace. As will all outliers, others will come along and make things sound more palatable, more commercial, more accessible perhaps, but I hope that in a decade from now, Moore will be hailed as the sonic visionary that opened the door to this world.
