There’s a din and dissonance rising up off the prairies in the Heartland. If it’s not the low rumble of 18-wheelers parading across the interstate, it might just be the artcore caterwaul of Moscow Puzzles. The band is an instrumental post-rock duo out of Iowa City, consisting of guitarist Tobin Hoover and drummer Tony Andrys. That’s it. And it’s more than enough to raise a racket on their latest release, Vast Space of the Interior.
If you’ve played a rock gig where the vocalist walks off stage to get a drink at the bar in the middle of the set so everyone else just starts jamming to kill time, that’s what Moscow Puzzles sound like. A galaxy brain moment occurs when everyone jamming at practice or the gig looks at each other and thinks: “This should be the band right here.” What can be accomplished when you cut away extraneous parts to get down to the essentials? Quite a lot.
Moscow Puzzles’ Vast Space of the Interior is an essay on what can be accomplished in the Rock ‘n’ Roll vernacular with guitar and drums alone. A rigorous assignment! No vocals for sure. Maybe a little bass sneaks in here and there. And what sounds like a synth cameo on the tail end of the closer. In any event, rigorous! Even more so because Moscow Puzzles—for the most part—eschew the easier two-piece route through bluesy dadrock like The Black Keys or White Stripes.
Instead, we get the vast space of post-rock. Six-string blastoffs, galactic riffing, extra-planetary percussive explorations. Moscow Puzzles prefers an epic, drawn-out wrestling match with a musical motif. In contrast with conventional pop hooks, which shoot across our attention span like little meteorites burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere, the band plants its flag on super-massive asteroids packing an extinction-level wallop.
How massive is super-massive? Pretty massive, if the ambitious suite “Monumentation” is any indication. The three-parter is situated in the middle of the album, right where you’d park the show stopping entree on a banquet table at a holiday feast. Let’s dig in one bite at a time.
“Monumentation I” is full of repetitive riffery. We’re far enough into the album where we’ve learned that this is a tool in the band’s toolkit. A feature, not a flaw. Lean into the monotony until it becomes a transcendent mantra. The opening song, “Highway Apathy,” dabbled in a metal variant of this meditative monotony. Meanwhile, “Unknown Fixed Object,” the closest thing to a single on the album, executed the strategy with No Wave flavor. In the “Monumentation” suite, the signature repetition assumes an even more programmatic bent, challenging the listener to get lost in the sound—or just get lost.
Like Andy Warhol’s ten-hour epic “Empire” or Terry Riley’s “In C,” you either get into it or you don’t. But if you stick around long enough, much like Riley’s “In C” (not so much with the crushing banality of Warhol’s “Empire”), there are aesthetic rewards to be reaped. The slow-to-medium tempo of Hoover’s guitar builds new landscapes out of micro inflections in his strumming. The chord progression itself develops at a glacial pace, but the shifting emphases in the strength, speed, and location of the strum can create surprising, quasi-arpeggiated clusters of notes pushing the musical theme forward, even as the riffery runs on repeat. The technique’s sonic texture is not unlike the chiming of church bells. Andry’s drums effectively underlines developing drama, and he injects a little Krautrock-style percussive chutzpah whenever the energy flags.
“Monumentation II,” the shortest movements in the suite, jacks up the intensity and pace. Ultimately, a throwaway transition piece. But it accomplishes its vital mission in the middle of the suite: to wake the listener up from the meditative monotony and refresh their attention for another four minutes or so of minimalist grinding in the final movement.
“Monumentation III” then slows back down to a medium tempo. In Vast Space of the Interior, Moscow Puzzles is not a band eager to sprint anywhere. Hey, it’s tiring. Plus, the strategy is focused on drawing the ear in to listen longer, closer, more carefully, rather than simply firing us up to stomp someone in the pit. The suite’s final movement flashes beautiful cascades of atonal guitar perambulation, grooving and grinding, sporting shades of Teenage Daydream-era Sonic Youth. But the slow fadeout instead of a Big Hollywood Finish steals some of the grandiosity from under the Monumentation trilogy.
Maybe that’s because Moscow Puzzles wanted to save some grandiosity for the last song of the album, “Every Tongue Will Confess.” At 14:12, it’s a long song by any standard, including the Standards’ standards. It’s a long song by design, a real grand finale, intended to draw the listener into a sublime and reflective mood through trance-inducing sonic repetition. Unlike bands that hyperextend songs through improvisation—jazz, jam, blues—or storytelling (Jim Morrison’s vision quest poetry on “The End” or Lou Reed inviting us along for a fix in “Heroin”), Hoover and Andrys offer the listener very little in terms of musical apotheosis at the end of the fourteen minutes. The repetition whips up to crescendo, then vanishes. We’re left with the soft humming of a synthesizer, the deus ex machina for a guitar/drums duo.
There’s a ritual, even religious, aspect to the hyper durational performativity of “Every Tongue Will Confess.” And it’s no coincidence, as the title is pulled from the Bible. The fuller quote runs as follows: “and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:11). Are we taking the piss out of Midwest Christian fundamentalism or is there a deeper spiritual problematic in search of a solution on this album? The answer is, of course, both. Vast Space of the Interior’s spiritual tenor challenges the conventions of established religion. But it’s a challenge that—just like Ray Charles’ appropriation of old gospel songs for new R&B jams—affirms the ultimate relevance of the source material. In a world full of superficial flash, bang, and zip, everyone wants a piece of the sublime wherever you might find it, in the club or church.
Have you been converted? Don’t worry, Moscow Puzzles are not the aggressively proselytizing type. With Vast Space of the Interior, they’ve built themselves a modest temple of worship. Attend services or don’t. But if you do, note what makes the band unique in the world of instrumental rock two-pieces. Superficially similar bands like Hella, Floral, and Rob Ford Explorer rely on spunk, vim, vigor, and blues-driven celerity to distract your musical mind from ruminating on the fact that only two musicians are standing in front of your ears. Moscow Puzzles takes a different tack, blazing a path to Rock ‘n’ Roll transcendence through repetition. Like the prairies of the band’s native Iowa, beautiful yet monotonous. Sometimes the monotony is sublime; other times it’s a grind. Either way, Moscow Puzzles have squeezed tremendous amounts of blood from their stone of choice. Pour it into a glass, say a quick prayer, and quaff in good health.
