Moin, 'Crappy Dreams Count'

As we near the year's end, #NowPlaying is recommending songs that slipped through the cracks, but remain in our headphones.

Moin is a post-punk trio with deep ties to London's electronic music scene — Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead make up Raime with percussionist Valentina Magaletti (Tomaga, Vanishing Twin) — and you can hear that precision infiltrate its debut album, Moot! The exclamation point in the album title is well earned; this is a dagger play of riff wreckage, with bass lines that groove as much as they open portals to other dimensions. The band exists somewhere in the deconstructed '90s punk nexus of Fugazi, Unwound and Shellac, but its high-definition payoff is somehow more psychedelic. For me, Magaletti's drumming is the draw, especially on a track like "Crappy Dreams Count" – the claustrophobic riff repeats and mutates throughout, but the drums shiver and shake with the electricity of a drum machine that's grown limbs.

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