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Released on March 6, 2015 via Napalm Records
While I haven’t been what you would call a die-hard Moonspell fan in some time, I was captivated by their sound long ago in the early 2000s and have been doing a decent job of keeping up with them ever since, and when I heard they were coming out with a new record, I wanted to see what the Portuguese black-metal-turned-goth-metalers were up to these days. It turns out something new and different, albeit very taste specific.
The group is famous for reinventing their sound over and over, but it always manages to surprise me due to how much they really do a complete overhaul of a lot of their mechanics when it comes to making music. Still, they always manage to keep things mystical and sing about all kinds of esoteric nonsense that gives you goosebumps, which I think is the one thing fans have consistently come to expect from the group.
The new record, Extinct, definitely follows the pattern of changing things up while only keeping a few things consistent. The first song starts out with their traditional mysterious-sounding vocals and heavy bass, but manage not to leave much to be desired in the heaviness department, either. The title track is probably one of the strongest on the album, and ‘Medusalem’ takes a foray into the all-out gothy rather than goth-metaly. ‘Domina’ might be my favorite track from the whole record, as I have always favored their slower and more plodding songs. ‘The Future is Dark’ and ‘A Dying Breed’ are both big hits in my book as well because of their similarity to The Antidote, which is my favorite record of theirs by far.
All in all, I would have to say there is not much not to love about this record, if you are a Moonspell fan. Of course, they are a very particular sounding band, and some metal fans just don’t dig their stuff. If I may be annoyingly self-indulgent for a second, this band is not something I would normally listen to. I don’t get into much other metal like it, but I was into Moonspell back when I was first figuring out what I liked in metal, and while I didn’t go the route of this sub-sub-genre, their particular sound and energy stuck with me. In a musical landscape as fickle as metal, I feel like that has to at least count for something.
