Moral Mazes 7″
Gold beach Fortress and Illinoise by Numbers
Little Rocket records
Is there such a thing a prolificness? Someone who is very prolific? Well if there is then J Robbins seems to be having a lockdown prolificness. While the rest of us are wallowing in our inability to mix J is mixing music at a speed of knots.
One release that sneaked out at the back end of 2020 was moral mazes. The idea of the band is that the aforementioned prolificer (again a made up word but I’m hoping you catch my drift) has joined forces with Darren Zentak from Kerosene 454, Channels and Office of Future Plans along with Chicago punk rock legend Jeff Dean. Jeff has played guitar in Airstream Futures, The Bomb, All Eyes West and Dead Ending so you are catching a bit of a punk rock U.S. hardcore noisey guitar strewn supergroup here.
They have a plan. That plan is for every release to have a guest vocalist putting words to the magical guitar sound. First time around it was Jonah Matranga from One Line drawing. This time around Michael Feerick from UK band Amusement Parks on Fire adds his piece. With each guest vocalist comes a different feel so the overall sound is different. Feerick’s voice has an overall mellow feel and a sweetness as he sings. Illinoise by Numbers is the slightly noisier of the 2 but there is a shoegaze influence that kind of reminds me of Dublin band In Motion show stormed our indie ecene in the 90’s. In Gold Beach Fortress Feerick sings of the Perfect Storm which could be an analogy for this band but instead of the storm we get a perfect guitar driven sound.
