ninehertz

Möbius arrive from out of leftfield, expressing themselves over four tracks which average more than ten minutes a piece on their new album Tensal. This is their first full length for eleven years, with band members moving apart, but once again finding ways to create and record from across their divide between Slovakia and Czech Republic.

This is expansive, exploratory doom with an experimental heart that ensures you won’t have heard anything exactly like it before. After a haunted, entrancing hummed introduction, Unity settles into Sunn O))) type drone, turning to more traditional doom halfway where weighty guitars and clattering percussive strikes provide the central focus, with an intensity that holds your attention.

Friendship has a cinematic quality to it, in no rush as it hovers around the full on drone and elongated doom border crossing threatening to tip either way at points. A becalmed guitar tempers affairs, light and optimistic for several minutes, before a loud clang nine minutes through wakes you with a stoner/doom groove. The way they play with minimalism and space pushes it into ethereal unchartered plains.

The guitars of Distance chime like a bell – a call to congregation in doom to be heard from afar. They provide subtle variation in how it drops out of the note each time which provides a momentum for the song to grow out of the earth beneath its feet, while the backing instrumentation starts to come to the fore and provide divergence from the metronomic centrepiece, twinkling and shimmering.

As the squawking saxophone addition of Eternal brings the album to a close, bringing thoughts of Bong-Ra in its explorative drone and repeating rhythm, you are once more mesmerised. Möbius have managed to craft something that stands alone here, and it is all the better for it – the core outputs and responses to drone yet allowed to move in and out of those states into more fluid styles. It makes for an always intriguing record.