ANTIMATTER

Black Market Enlightenment music in stone Mick Moss gets gloomier and heavier, rekindling chemical memories.

If anger is an energy, Mick Moss has got a fair bit of mileage out of it in recent years. But now he seems to be exploring different shades of black mood. 2015’s The Judas Table took lyrical aim at “the people whose callous and disrespectful, backstabbing actions caused me countless wasted years of depression”, as he put it. A happy-clappy affair it wasn’t, but the intensity of the songs made for a riveting listen, even if sometimes it felt like you were eavesdropping on a huge row.

But let’s face it: rock musicians that gain most inspiration from happier periods in their lives are in a pretty small minority. So maybe that’s why, for this seventh studio set, Moss seems to have once more reached back into the murkier corners of his past for creative fuel.

In the making-of documentary DVD included along with this seventh Antimatter album, he explains Black Market Enlightenment as an exploration of his younger days, where his habit of using acid trips and weed to open the doors of perception ended in him being “diagnosed with psychosis and suffering from derealisation and daily panic attacks”.

There’s also a distinctly different feel to the music. The Judas Table’s rage was punctuated with acoustic passages and more subtle electronic and singer-songwriter-ish textures. Black Market Enlightenment feels more insistently, sometimes claustrophobically heavy, the closest Antimatter have come to fully cloaked-up, symphonically enhanced gothic rock.

Thundering, windswept dramatic soundscapes are the order of the day as Moss rekindles the fires of his own drug hell, and while it might not offer the same degree of contrast or light-and-shade dynamics, it sure is effective.

‘All it would take is a whisper or a kiss to seal my place within the abyss,’ Moss sings in an Eddie Vedder-esque basso profondo as the sublime Wish I Was Here builds from pianoled soliloquy into sweeping, soaring melodrama driven by booming power chords.

There are also some intriguing light touches, though. Sanctification is similarly huge-sounding in parts, but before it ends in an apocalyptic storm of pummelling double-bass drum, clouds of Floydian sax float overhead before haunting Middle Eastern stringed instrument the qamancheh adds a really spellbinding diversion. When the qamancheh surfaces again later at the climax of Between The Atoms after our hero’s vocal is reduced to a warped whisper of ‘Am I still here?’ it initially sounds like a man attempting to sing underwater. Which may well be the intended effect.

So he’s drowning, not waving, once again. But however grim Moss’ situation, we just can’t tear ourselves away…

THUNDERING, WINDSWEPT DRAMATIC SOUNDSCAPES.