The Soft Moon
Criminal

The contents of the fourth LP by the Soft Moon, actually a solo project of the Oakland (but now San Francisco, California-based) singer and multi-instrumentalist Luis Vasquez, somehow unveil the claustrophobic and obsessive sounds that have always characterized their sound since the beginnings in 2009 and then from 2010 with the release of the first eponymous LP on Captured Tracks. "Criminal," Vasquez’s fourth studio LP, is set to be released on February 2 and marks the start of the collaboration between the artist and the label Sacred Bones. The album can be defined as a sort of open-hearted confession, in which Vasquez, crafting a record with strictly personal content, shares his inner conflicts and guilt stemming from a difficult and violent childhood that began in the early eighties and continued with the consumption and dependency on cocaine intake, leading to self-hatred and contempt. A dimension that brought him to the brink of madness and against which he is still battling today.

Just as with the previous album ("Deeper," 2015), Luis decided to record the album in Italy, more precisely in Bassano del Grappa, where he worked closely with Maurizio Baggio and crafted the music in a way that highlights the lyrics, which he considers more central and dominant within the overall context of his work and the final outcome of the recording phases and processes. "Criminal" is an album whose sounds, in the Soft Moon tradition, are claustrophobic and obsessive and loaded with dark atmospheres in the path set by a long minimal tradition that began with the dark wave experiments of the eighties, with Luis Vasquez considered one of its continuators. The album opens immediately with "Burns," a song whose vocals hark back to some dark experiences of the eighties. The sound reveals itself as compulsive, repetitive, and loaded with noise sounds that converge into forms of abstract expressionism ("It Kills," "Born Into This"). "Choke" introduces post-industrial sounds that combine perfectly with the album's atmospheres and, on certain occasions, become dominant and constitute the premise upon which individual songs are built ("ILL," "Young"...), while in other cases, they combine with dark-wave and minimal celebrations like "Like A Father," "The Pain." Elsewhere, the synth sound dominates, opening up to dark ambient compositions such as "Give Me Something" and the solemn concluding title track "Criminal."

Balancing between KVB and markedly industrial sounds and the post-punk revival of Disappears, successors of A Place To Bury Strangers, Luis Vasquez creates a work charged with what we can define as desperation and genuine suffering. Preceded by the singles "Burn" and "It Kills," "Criminal" is, however, contrary to what one might think and what was a certain expression in the past of the dark wave movement during the eighties; instead of being a kind of celebration of this status quo, it’s indeed a true scream. Cries for help suffocated in an internal confusion which - through this process of confession and self-crucifixion - seeks, in some way, to come to a resolution.