The music of now-defunct Canadian trio AIDS Wolf was as bold and confrontational as their name. It was a blare of frenetic energy and rhythmic bludgeoning. Beneath all the prog-punk brutality lurked actual song structures, the kind that could easily hypnotize anyone with the patience to uncover them. But no matter how long you stuck with them, AIDS Wolf always managed to incite dizziness through chaos.
In his solo project Drainolith, AIDS Wolf guitarist Alexander Moskos has a similar goal, but comes at it from an opposite side. Where his former band built an in-your-face wall, Moskos’ sound is all skeleton. The moving parts and overlapping shapes that motor his songs are in clear view. He’s not afraid to get dense and noisy too, but you can always hear a Drainolith tune being built, each element working to find its place. Beats fall down and get back up; shards of guitar riffs build into loops; somnambulant moans glide by, then dive into the music’s crevices.
On Hysteria, the follow-up to Drainolith’s 2012 debut Fighting!, everything emerges in semi-slow motion. It’s as if there's a faster, tighter version of these songs out there somewhere that Moskos could catch up to if he felt like it. But he’s more interested in wrestling the ghosts of those imagined tunes than inhabiting their bodies. The effect is disorienting but intoxicating—music designed to sneak up rather than overwhelm.
Especially mesmerizing is the way Moskos fuses together melodies while simultaneously wrenching them apart. It feels like you should be able to hum along to these songs—and in places you can—but it's all skewed enough to dodge predictability. Moskos grafts together parts that don’t naturally fit in a way that recalls Captain Beefheart’s misshapen anti-songs, but his aura is much woozier, almost lethargic. Yet Hysteria rarely settles into grooves that allow passive listening. Moskos may sound like a stoner, but that's because he wants you to feel foggy and confused rather than comfortable.
This smoky haze comes across in Moskos’ words, too. During "Inside and Outside (Bog’s Blues)", he sounds like he’s not even sure he’s awake: "The structure of my sleep/ Is different this time," he slurs, practically drooling onto the pillow. In the drifting, beat-less "Joy Road", he whispers that "Sometimes it seems like everything’s/ Moving too damn fast.../ Slow it down/ Move the ground/ Watch it shake." Moskos’ zombified delivery recalls the sleep-walk of Excepter’s John Fell Ryan. But where that band often sounds like deconstructed disco, Drainolith is more like fractured rock—rock whose muscles have been stretched so much its bones dislodge and rattle against each other.
There’s also a hint of broken blues to Hysteria that recalls the more drug-addled side of Royal Trux. That’s not surprising, since Neil Michael Hagerty produced this session, which also resulted in the excellent Dan’l Boone record featuring Hagerty, Moskos, and Wolf Eyes’ Nate Young. But such comparisons just reveal Moskos’ very particular take on rock, an approach that resolutely eschews expected patterns. The result is a kind of blissful cognitive dissonance, making Hysteria’s 25 minutes feel wonderfully longer.
