Songs on this album are wholly based on dynamics, with quiet, ambient moments to break up the thrash, classic rock, and death metal driven that populates the rest of the "cd". Solos can sporadically sound like scales, a pet peeve of mine, and im sure of numerous other listeners, but they can also sound fresh and creative. Admittedly, there are a fair number of bland moments where Nathan drags out a riff for about twice as long as he should of, I'd say there's a good ten minutes of unnecessary riffing on the whole album. While this unnecessary riffing doesn't make it unpleasant to listen to, it reduces the effectiveness of his riffs. One of the better moments on the album, in my opinion, is the song damnation, particularly the intro, which is a quiet, moody riff on the guitar. It's a simple riff, but it opens up into a much larger, more powerful riff nicely (back to the dynamics bit). About three minutes in is another instance of him taking a great riff and driving it into the ground. The riff right here has a really cool rhythm, with a "plucky" nature about it, and the chords sound a little more like he's hitting each individual string, rather than creating a single sound. This song also breaches the limit of "too dynamic", sounding like your tuning through different radio stations (without the static). Its a neat experience, and I think its pretty cool to do what he did here, but this might have been a little too disorganized as it no longer feels like a single song. I would be more impressed, if he could find a way to make it sound like one massive song, rather than different movements in a piece by mozart or any other of a milieu of classical composers.
Swimming the Phlegethon features a really cool line on rhythm guitar that has a very traditional hard rock sound, (the whole song does, but particularly the rhythm guitar), but it drones until the fourth minute, when it changes up to a "bridge" that i dont know how to describe (so look it up, its really cool). From that point forwards, this song turns into a ramble across the metal sub genres, you've got stuff with the middle eastern sound Nile goes for, some death metal riffs akin to decapitated, and some breakdowns that are really quiet enjoyable, setting the stage for some of the better solos on the album.
To address the drums in retrospect, they sounded like a machine may have been doing them. The drum patterns were changed up like the guitar. The drums never transcended my expectations for N. Moss based on the work on the guitar, and mostly lagged behind at just "above average". Fills used the standard amenities but never relied on one in particular, overall, they were alright.
N. Moss's almost rambling experimental project with "Motions" features some really neat dynamics on the guitar, but thats where the excitement truly stops. He uses guitar elements from other genres, but he doesn't change much about it, he knows how to program the drums, but he doesn't innovate or take really big risks with it that make me want to go back and listen to any of the fills again. Overall a 9/10 on the way it was compiled, minus some points for not living up to the composition of his songs.
8.5/10
http://nmoss.bandcamp.com/album/motions
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