Modern musical miracles like Spotify, iTunes, and Pandora have made it nearly impossible to listen to, much less appreciate, an album in its full scope. Listeners are incessantly pandered internet singles and browse social playlists sorted by individual track popularity. Not all of this is bad but I could handle less mixtapes and more complete records. Most people listen to music like they ate fast food when they were kids – impatiently, without discretion, and about seven seconds away from hitting someone in the ball pit for their Happy Meal toy.
Luis Vasquez is not ordering at a drive-thru window. In fact, he’s probably outside somewhere slow-cooking a pig in druid robes. The Bay Area multi-instrumentalist (a.k.a. The Soft Moon) released Zeros the day before Halloween, a perfect time for his noise-rock product that draws directly from darkwave godfathers like Bauhaus and Joy Division. Zeros’ synth-thick choruses, heavy whispers, and shoegazing drones conjure up the anxious dread of exploring an empty city or witnessing a grisly crime. What most noise-rock fans will appreciate about the record is how consistent it is. Each track on Zeros is carefully fitted to the album’s story, much like the score to film. The music is gracefully staged and cinematic and Vasquez is unafraid to let his synthesizers and bass do the singing for him.
Zeros begins with the brooding threnody “It Ends,” introducing Vasquez’s signature panting. Tracks like “Die Life,” “Crush,” and “Lost Years” don’t exactly make you feel warm and fuzzy inside but Vasquez is less concerned with crafting crowd-pleasing singles than he is with building an overwhelming mood. The music progresses like a concept album but feels more like a silent movie, forcing listeners to think visually and listen patiently. Vasquez rarely blesses us with his vocals but when he does we’re backed into a corner by his schizophrenic blend of distant whispers, labored breathing, and soft shouts – the kind of noises you could imagine Ian Curtis having a conversation with.
After I had listened to Zeros for the second time, I climbed to my rooftop and surveyed the bleak skyline of Lower Manhattan. It had been two days since post-tropical cyclone Sandy had shut down the island and Vasquez’s music seemed like a fitting score to New York City’s isolation. The Soft Moon’s Zeros offers us music with a plot and an atmospheric experience that is hard to find these days.
4 / 5 stars
