Album Review: AlithiA - The Moon Has Fallen

Wow. What a journey. What a challenge. Melbourne "progressive psychedelic tribal rock" six-piece AlithiA has laid down the gauntlet to listeners on The Moon Has Fallen, saying, 'listen to this, try to get your head around it, try to understand it’. There is so much to take in, but if you are patient and persistent with it, the rewards are profound. Just don’t attempt to do it on one listen, or two, or even five or…

This is a band that squeezes more ideas into a single song than many bands put into an entire album. Hell, an entire career in some cases. If you require an example of this, look no further than track one, The Sun. Pushing 11 minutes, the track takes you in so many, seemingly disparate directions that it’s difficult to keep track of it all. And it’s kind of a microcosm of the record as a whole, a record that is, despite its sprawling and overwhelmingly ambitious nature, compelling from go to whoah.

At the same time, however, it is not a case of a band throwing as many ideas as they can randomly at the wall and seeing which ones stick; these guys know exactly and precisely what they are doing. It is cohesive, it has meaning and depth, it has a groove, it has recurring themes. It’s just all delivered in a manner that is very, well, AlithiA.

Fans of the band know exactly what this means. To those uninitiated with this band’s unique and idiosyncratic charms, well, familiarise yourself with them. Just do so without any expectations of instant gratification. You will not regret it.