It’s not many review submissions that land which are ‘humble’, so the email announcing the arrival of Honolulu Blitz’s second album – a decade after their debut – leading with the title ‘Humble review submission: new album from Honolulu Blitz - Pale Moon’ breaks new ground for me although said email opens with ‘hey mate’, which is perhaps not quite so humble. But no matter.
It also seemingly breaks new ground for the Copenhagen-based trio, too, showcasing a sound that’s slower, heavier, doomier, and dronier than its predecessor, offering ‘seven tracks inspired by life and death, love and misery, joy and hopelessness’.
Swooning drones and slow, deliberate, picked post-rock guitars are at the heart of this expansive album, and if the proggy, Pink Floyd-y lead solos feel a shade excessive, it’s likely as much on account of the clean, heavily processed sound as the composition or actual performance. The title tracks paves the way, and improves significantly when the pulverising power chords and thudding percussion heave in at a lumbering crawl and heavy as hell, inviting comparisons to The Melvins in the process.
Thereafter, the guys bring the riffs: slow, weighty, churning and cyclical, ‘The Roach’ grinding away, hard and unrelenting. There’s a vaguely psychedelic twist to the sludgy trudge of the eight-minute ‘Rainbow Eater’, with its grand, dramatic vocals, while ‘Drones’ and ‘Into the White’ go oddly desert / country with some reverby twang, and ‘The Machine’ screams some heavy blues fretwork while sounding like a doom metal Depeche Kode, and time and again, ‘Pale Moon’ shines through as an album of immense ambition that’s matched by its power – and time and again, they sound like way more than a trio as the guitars step up layer upon layer of volume and crunch, and then the solo flies in, and when they hit the groove, man, do they hit the groove.
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