Chronologically speaking, The Atlas Moth can’t escape being perceived as joiners rather than shapers of post-metal. While their 2009 debut,
It’s not easy to not sound cynical or dismissive making such comparisons, and it must be stressed that the band’s genuine creativity is not put to question. Yet within the confines of 180 words, the shortest, most communicative route to explain what happens on The Old Believer is to have you imagine a lost Isis album recorded somewhere between Celestial and Panopticon having been resurfaced. Nevertheless, Isis’s splendidly monolithic approach gets stretched and mutated.
The shift between sung and screamed parts (evident on the title track but pretty much throughout) instills a doom feel, while the labyrinthine guitar work recalls Mastodon at its highest psych-prog crests. The second-wave of post-metal is upon us.
