After releasing its seventh album, Hanging Garden is already back with a new EP in 2022.
Mikko Kolari (guitar), Jussi Hämäläinen (guitar/vocals, Mercury Circle), Nino Hynninen (keyboards, ex-Clockwork Spirit), Toni Hatakka (vocals, 2nd Suicide, ex-Clockwork Spirit), Jussi Kirves (bass, Inland), Sami Forsstén (drums) and Riikka Hatakka (vocals) introduce us to Neither Moth nor Rust.
We begin with Neither Moth nor Rust, the eponymous track, which suddenly unveils a luminous melancholy on which clean vocals live with heady harmonics and massive howlings. The melting is intense, hooking and above all very accessible, but the song is short, and The Last Dance quickly comes next with piercing melodies. Quietness barely seems to be disrupted by howlings or the some robotic vocals parts, but we feel the rhythmic’s coldness only asks to explode, and the band regularly allows it while feeding it with airy voices or keyboards, just like on And Leave All Love Behind and its majestic Gothic accents. The softness of this appeasing composition peacefully carries us until The Raven Portrait, a piano interlude which keeps the mysterious quietness before vocals appear again on On the Shore of Eternity. The song wears a sinister bassline, which will be regularly strengthened by an outstanding, heady and cold dissonance, then the EP ends with Field of Reeds (Avalon Skies Rework), a song from the last album rearranged by the Electro artist Avalon Skies. Strangely, both universes are perfectly suitable, and their collaboration allows to close this chapter with another kind of softness.
For Hanging Garden, softness rhymes with intensity. With Neither Moth nor Rust, the band continues on the way they opened with their previous works, adding a touch of smoothness and an ice-cold ambience to this melancholic universe.
85/100