Moletrap – Mid Welsh, Pt. 1 EP

Moletrap are back with a brand-new release that will immediately resonate with anyone who appreciates cleverly assembled and flawlessly performed music. “Mid Welsh, Pt. 1” is their latest piece of sonic artistry arriving as a conceptual release, further showcasing the tremendous songwriting, composing, arranging, and producing abilities of an already incredible band. In an overly saturated contemporary music scene, so many artists and bands tirelessly exploit the same old themes and emulate the sound greats invented decades ago, falling into familiar clichés like they’re trying to reinvent the same old wheel over and over again. Moletrap avoids those mistakes by covering completely different themes and blending many complementary genres at once. Lyrically, “Mid Welsh, Pt. 1” is entirely about Mid Wales and what it means to Moletrap to be Mid-Walian. These songs showcase their profound love for the heritage and culture in an attempt to preserve the Welsh language, which was removed from public institutions during the colonisation. Sonically, Moletrap combines various approaches, techniques, and styles to illustrate such luxuriant sonic imagery. Perhaps alternative comes to mind first, as the band dominantly explores both alternative rock and alternative pop, but you’ll unquestionably stumble upon so many other sonic ingredients borrowed from modern hard rock, grunge, garage, post-punk, indie, funk, folk, and many more. It’s nearly mindblowing how they combined all these genres together, keeping alternative as their primary sonic direction from scratch to finish. These tracks carry so many qualities that meet all the trends in contemporary music production that you’ll need to spin them several times until you fully grasp all the layers, elements, nuances, and other details. Therefore, these experimentations with various approaches, techniques, and styles resulted in a memorable, addictive, fascinating collection of songs that will suit anyone who appreciates cleverly assembled and flawlessly performed music.

This epic sonic journey commences with “Rhagofn,” an excellent opening composition that showcases Moletrap’s knack for merging folk aesthetics with heavy, raw, aggressive sound. The band builds the atmosphere with drumming patterns, gradually transitioning into catchy, memorable, engaging violin leads. The generously distorted guitar riffs immensely support the mentioned orchestrations without overwhelming them, while the equally intricate basslines bring warmth, clarity, and depth to the ambiance, and tastefully rhythmic patterns dictate groove and pace. In the meantime, the vocals serve as centerpiece, keeping listeners focused on lyrics and uplifting everything to an entirely new level. Such an excellent opening composition that vividly showcases what you might expect from the remainder of the material. “Taffy” continues at the same pace, delivering more straightforward alternative, garage, and indie rock sound. Those jangly yet tastefully distorted chord progressions perfectly suit shouty vocal lines while the rhythm section delivers more groove, detail, pace, and dynamics. This composition has such a perfect structure, replete with many profoundly detailed segments, brilliant ideas, and marvelous orchestrations. Although complex, it’s also easy listening track with many anthemic segments. “What A Beautiful Place” channels early noughties alternative and indie rock sound with a subtle folk-rock aesthetic lurking around. Still, it’s a classic Moletrap’s track, demonstrating their signature moves. The interplays between powerful riffs and catchy, memorable, engaging themes, melodies, and harmonies perfectly match vocal harmonies. The vocals continuously levitate between melodic singing techniques and shouting, bringing more detail to the song. You’ll also notice how the bass guitar once again rumbles beneath all those guitar works, delivering subtly distorted low-ends and providing more heftiness, clearness, and deepness to the song while simultaneously binding mentioned orchestrations with rhythmic patterns. These low-end maneuvers continue on the “Middle Of The Land,” but in a more modern sense. Paired with energetic, expertly assembled, flawlessly performed, well-accentuated beats, breaks, fills, and other percussive acrobatics, they provide a rock-solid support for all those melodic sing-alongs and profoundly melodic guitar works. This track shines with so many briliant ideas and marvelous orchestrations, and it will immediately find its way on so many music playlists. This epic sonic journey comes to an end with “Nation Of Sanctuary,” a perfect closing track that sums up everything. Moletrap shines here, as they blend everything they already demonstrated in previous songs, but with even more melody, harmony, rawness, power, and heaviness. It’s also one of those songs that will immediately convince you to spin this EP all over again.

Moletrap has created a brilliant homage to Mid Wales. Each composition acts as a homage and ode to Welsh identity, heritage, and culture. “Mid Welsh, Pt. 1” also showcases years of experience, knowledge, creativity, talent, and skill distilled into brilliant ideas and fascinating musicanship, melded into catchy, memorable, engaging, anthemic songs. It’s a perfect EP where the tremendous brilliance of this band shines in the limelight. Therefore, “Mid Welsh, Pt. 1” is one of the finest releases this year, and you surely do not want to miss it. Head to your favorite streaming platform and listen to it loud.