���� Seattle avant-punks Eye Of Nix follow up that promising demo they released a while back with their first full-length album Moros, and it's a heavier, more focused effort that captures the band's unusual sound really well. The six songs deliver a similar brand of dark, atmospheric crust-metal as the demo, moving from rampaging D-beat driven heaviness to lumbering doom to passages of plaintive melody that can sometimes remind me of stuff like Amber Asylum or Worm Ouroboros. But where the ideas on the demo could sometimes feel a little fragmented, the album tightens the band's sound considerably, with a greater attention to dynamic songwriting. Of course, classically trained lead singer Joy Von Spain is still at the center of Eye of Nix's tumult; when she starts belting out those soulful vocals of hers over the furious, filth-encrusted thrash or crawling doom-laden heaviness, it's almost like you're hearing former Swans chanteuse Jarboe fronting an assault of darkened metallic hardcore. Von Spain's no clone though, she's definitely has a powerful, distinctive delivery of her own, and she mixes up those soaring vocals with hair-raising shrieks that are sometimes answered by the death metal-esque roars of her bandmates.

���� At it's heaviest, Moros rumbles with their rough-hewn, sometimes vaguely blackened heaviness, but that aggression is tempered by moments of plaintive prettiness like "Veil" where Von Spain sings softly over a languid guitar melody and the sounds of birds, or the striking post-punk and pummeling percussive power of "Turned To Ash", which reveals even more of a Swans influence. And the last song gets pretty noisy, slowly winding down into a massive dirge as the guitars erupt into gales of distorted roar, unleashing abrasive electronic noise and transforming the vocals into a series of wrenching screams, closing the record in a blast of terrifying violence. It's a strong album from the band, dialing back some of the discordance and the harsher edges that appeared on their earlier recordings, the songs more focused on building a haunting, pre-apocalyptic atmosphere that matches the dire visions found in the band's lyrics. Great stuff.