Listening to Avoidance Moon is akin to wandering through a derelict Victorian asylum reclaimed by a digital-age squatters’ collective: there is a sense of grand, structural history being swallowed by a very modern, very jagged decay. On his sixth outing as Zabus, Washington D.C. polymath Jeremy Moore has created a record that exists in the friction between the intentional and the accidental, where imperfection is the only honest thing left in the room.
As the engine behind the Saccharine Underground label, Moore has spent years cultivating a specific brand of D.C. outsiderism that feels untethered from the city’s storied hardcore lineage. Instead, his pedigree (stretching through projects like Gorazde, Zero Swann, and Bell Barrow) suggests a kinship with the more esoteric corners of the 4AD catalogue or the abrasive, art-damaged fringes of no-wave.
On Avoidance Moon, Moore leans heavily into a DIY ethos. Recorded at The Prisoner’s Cinema and engineered alongside Andy Baldwin, the album deliberately eschews the sheen of contemporary indie production. Drums are pushed into cassette-tape saturation until they crumble; vintage microphones hiss with the static of five decades. Moore handles nearly every element here, voice, guitars, fretless bass, and synthesis, resulting in a singular, if claustrophobic, vision. The title track, ‘Avoidance Moon’, opens the record by wallowing in its own underproduction. It is a sketch of isolation where guitars and synths provide a thin, shivering bed for Moore’s baritone, a voice that has become the project’s most potent asset. It’s followed by ‘Theoretical Jesus’, a track that briefly drapes a “palatable” indie-rock cloak over its shoulders. It’s the closest Moore comes to a traditional hook, yet the noise-rock guitars buried in the periphery suggest a violence that is only barely being contained for the sake of the recording.
‘On Tender Hooks’ and ‘Leather Mouth’ channel the drugged-out, low-fi psych of early The Brian Jonestown Massacre, specifically the skeletal minimalism of Spacegirl and Other Favorites. There is a palpable sense of “Berlin-era” Nick Cave on ‘Baited Idyll’, where off-kilter drumming and demented carnival organ create a “carny” atmosphere that feels both whimsical and predatory. It is gloriously messy, a calculated collapse of timing that mirrors the “psychic exhaustion” Moore cites as the album’s conceptual core.
The record’s midsection explores a bleak, noir-inflected shoegaze. ‘Punishment To Extinction’ and ‘Communion’ hit with the immediate, wall-of-sound weight of My Bloody Valentine, but they are quickly filtered through a lens of dark existentialism. Rather than the soaring etherealism usually associated with the genre, these tracks feel thematically heavy and grounded, weighted down by lyrical themes of sexual coercion and social erasure. ‘Corrective Rape’ is particularly harrowing, a track where the music takes a backseat to a narrative of brutal imposition, demanding a level of presence from the listener that is frankly exhausting.
By the time the record closes with ‘The Science Of Seance’, the listener has been dragged through a landscape that is intentionally difficult to navigate. Moore’s decision to keep his vocals forward in the mix ensures that the “lived conflict” of his characters, shifting between genders and perspectives, is never lost in the heavily subdued mix.
Avoidance Moon is a demanding work. It is an album that hides its musicality under layers of tape hiss and deliberate tonal “incorrectness,” yet it feels more vital for its ugliness. It is not an “easy” listen, nor does it want to be. Moore’s latest outing is a document of the margins, a record that finds a strange, terrifying power in the act of not looking away. It presents a defiant insistence on consciousness in a world that prefers the hollow and the polished.
Listen to Avoidance Moon and keep up-to-date with Zabus, Saccharine Underground and Jeremy Moore at the following links:
Purchase/Stream: Zabus on Bandcamp
Label: Saccharine Underground on Bandcamp
Listen: Zabus on Spotify
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