INTO THE MOAT SET OUT TO MAKE YOU REGRET THAT YOU FORGOT THEY EXISTED ON THE CAMPAIGN
Into the Moat’s 2005 debut The Design knocked many on their collective asses with its combination of technical metalcore riffery and rumbling-of-Zeus breakdowns. Of course, repeated listens to this record yielded only a few good songs followed by a lot of thin, droll filler (and even those good songs grew tiresome after a while), as did so many technical metalcore albums from that period. It was hard to envision the band growing into anything more than squiggly guitars and thundering breakdowns, and the four year gap between The Design and Into the Moat’s latest, The Campaign, could have been assumed to be due to the band members focusing on their day jobs and letting Into the Moat fade into obscurity. Of course, they were honing their sound, turning a few monsters into a multitheaded beast. Though the dozens-of-time-signatures thing fizzled out a few trends ago, Into the Moat still manage to sound inventive and relevant, growing without having to make friends with 4/4 time or clean singing.
