SILVER MOTH

Black Bay BELLA UNION

IT’S QUITE THE ATMOSPHERIC HEADPHONES LISTEN.

Post-rock-driven super-collective take flight.

Asymbol of migration and transformation, the silver moth provides an apt metaphor for the movement and transmutation of seven notable UK musicians – Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite, left-field dance act Elisabeth Elektra, atmospheric gothic stars Evi Vine and Steven Hill, plus Abrasive Trees members Matthew Rochford, Ash Babb and Ben Roberts – into a new group. Headed towards the light, Silver Moth emerges from “the edge of the world”, the Isle Of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, with a debut album named after their waterside studio cocoon, Black Bay.

So far, so dramatic. And the music follows, created with dark ambient, post-rock, folk and psychedelia at its core. It opens with the brooding, ghostly Henry, voiced by Vine with her breathy, tremulant style, backed by delicate piano, trip hop drums and cello. ‘Oh, my desire holds… holds me down,’ Vine sighs before total tumult ensues, then gentle resolution. Fans of Crippled Black Phoenix, draw closer.

The Eternal shifts to an uplifting memorial to a friend, with a military drum tattoo beat beneath Electra’s soft, superenunciated soprano, raised further by a wall of polyphonic synth chords, a high-gliding guitar and a Jesus And Mary Chain-like tambourine thwack to keep things moving along.

From here, things start to go more liminal. Elektra and

Vine team up for the piano-pinned, Pentangling Mother Tongue, a hypnotic invocation with a powerful feminine focus – ‘Wake up… we were warriors’ – soon followed by the sound effect-laden drone of Gaelic Psalms. Here Rochford recites a poem of Celtic history mingled with religion and folklore by his late father Gerard – English-born, but enamoured enough of Scotland to make Aberdeen his home, and to become celebrated there for his free verse.

Tapping into primal fears and attraction to darkness, it segues into a creepy Hello Doom, where something unsettling rattles away as guitars, cello and synths gauzily mingle, and dreamy vocals repeat behind a distorted guitar line. Lasting 15 minutes, layers of blackened and metallic textures and urgent guitar SOS-ing soundtrack the march of phantom droves coming from the ocean, onto the shore, to your door. It’s quite the atmospheric headphones listen, thanks to producer Pete Fletcher (and now this writer has to sleep with the light on for a few nights).

Final track Sedna takes a bright, gorgeous ambient route

‘home… to the sea’, restoring a little hope but still with some sort of spectre just out of shot, rounding off this excellent, cinematic entrée where the high quality of the results seems to have even surprised its creators.