Moggs is a little-known two-piece from the San Francisco Bay Area, a boy on guitar, a girl on drums, and both of them on the mic. With big fat down-tuned guitar, often off-time “mathy” rhythms, and monotone, punky vocals, they create a sound that seems purposely jarring and ugly. The Sonic Youth comparison is easy to make, but I’d hate to heap such a limiting description on a band that sounds this authentic, and that, frankly, rocks harder than Sonic Youth most of the time. They’re too technically complex to be called grunge, and way too slow to be called math metal … so “math-grunge,” I guess? Just listen to them because damnit I think they’re great!
The White Belt Is Not Enough
2005
9 out of 10
I’m gonna assume these folks wanted this album to sound as raw as it does, because they show enough savvy I figure they knew what they were doing. There’s just a blaring, obnoxious, echoey, reverby sound, a sound so big it can’t fit in your speakers. The playing is full of jagged edges, scratches, screeches, minor chords, unexpected stops and starts, controlled chaos sequences, but somehow most of the songs find their way into hooky payoffs, with vocals smartly packed underneath the volume of the instruments and placed into the right nooks and crannies to shine through.
I really like it. It’s got frenetic energy. It violently hurls itself around in zig-zags and lopsided circles. When the girl is signing, it sounds like she’s defiantly shouting at you from inside a sewer. “Disco” starts with a harmless dancing beat and adds these little guitar chokes, then EXPLODES into this mean, layered chorus over a 1-2, 1-2 kinda beat with the girl talking SHIT! “C-C-C” is another wildly structured song, going from jumbled up nonsense into a nicely synched running part and into a few more rhythm changes, and all the while the guitar rides these ugly chords (I’m guessing C chords?), and the thing kinda falls apart (in a good way) at the end. Check it out!
Amulat EP
2008
6 out of 10
Hey, don’t you love it when “EP” is in the title so I don’t have to tell you it’s an EP? I sure do! We’ve got just four songs this time, and it’s quite a departure from the first release: slow and dreary, much more controlled sound, the girl takes the lead on vocals, and there’s a different guest musician on each song, so we get three with a bass and one with machine-ish sounds. There’s kind of a dark beauty to a few guitar lines, and occasionally there’s a touch of that off-time racket, but it’s mostly very subdued, crawly creepy stuff. It’s pretty forgettable, to be honest, but if you like the full-length, you may as well give this a shot too.
Published October 2021