Album Review: Miracle Healing Crusade

“Take a pinch of Raincoats, add a tablespoon of early Swans, sauté in the first Stooges album and add half a brick. Put it in a sock. Bon appétit!” – Bruce Russell, The Dead C

Moider Mother have been at large since 2022. Miracle Healing Crusade is their debut album. Cults, cannibals and killers are a few of their favourite things and comprise the putrescent heart of this wholesome family band.

The members include mother: Hannah Harte on howl (vocals), father: Nick Harte (The Shocking Pinks) on decalescent hermeneutics (bass), and son: Noah McKay thrashing the membrane (drums). They have collaborated with Grecco Romank and played shows with Clementine Valentine and Delaney Davidson.

Hannah Harte’s vocals have that quality of harm that I always appreciate and make an effort to note in my reviews. Often in aggressive music, you can hear the fine-tuned technique of the growls and screams so specifically executed that it feels like the vocalists have no real skin in the game.

By contrast, you can almost hear the throat tissue tearing in real time with Harte’s delivery, particularly in songs like Influencer Scum, Infinity Land and the horror shriek styling of Poludnica. That visceral type of expulsion was found more reliably in corners of late 70’s English punk and industrial and probably had its most notable exposure in popular music through the stomach ulcer tainted retching of Kurt Cobain. It’s really rare to get that feeling that somebody is sacrificing a piece of themselves to give a performance and it always leaves me with a special kind of gratitude.

The bass tone sounds like the hollowed out chimney bricks of a working-class London town house thrown in a haunted freight container.
Sometimes the tones resonate almost like tubular bells and sometimes they sound like calcified cat guts. A great example is the well-chosen single, Brick in a Stocking, which at first sounds like Nick Harte is trying to play a CT scan through a bass amp. Every time he plays a longer note or a muted hit, it reminds me of some unseen predator uttering a terrifying dirge seemingly for no other reason than to make you soil yourself before your death.
The pick scrape breakdown on Poludnica is stirring. He locks in with the drums regularly for angular stops like in Swollen, which also has a really catchy riff at the end. There are even moments where the riffage slides into funk territory, like the unsettling Infinity Land.

Drummer Noah McKay brings some variance to the fray of violent intent across the play time. Though often drowned out by the commanding and insistent presence of his parents, McKay finds places to add different dynamic perches and instrumentation. He uses syncopation to break up the onslaught and finds novel ways to add notes of complexity in songs like Birds Aren’t Real with its factory machinery conveyor belt playing, the intermittent hi-hatting of Sugoi Sugoi and the hypnotic, dizzying off-kilter of King of the Incels.

The lyrics are vile, contemptuous mantras of dissatisfaction in the first half and gore glorifying epithets of destruction in the second half. King of the Incels mocks the advice of conservative self-help writer Jordan Peterson and his meat-diet daughter. Influencer Scum is a particularly personal sounding attack on the dubious occupation.

All the songs devolve into repeated phrases spewed with escalating vigour. There’s a great intersection between poetry and reporting in the lyrics that I think the world needs more of. All too often, lyricists get caught up in flowery language that loses meaning. Words like “Don’t worry, that’s just the taste of beer/ don’t worry, that’s just how beer tastes, my dear/ don’t worry, that’s just how beer tastes alright!?” are stripped of a certain pretension but still point to a subtext under the hood.

The simple of pleasure of listing ways of killing people in El Cadaver Incompleto is a great example of the presence of artistic structure without being insufferable about it. Language like “I’ll sew you into a dead horse” is so blunt as to be funny in parts.

There is the occasional profound statement too; my favourite quote from Miracle Healing Crusade is “Are you upset or just spoon-fed sadness” from the track Swollen. It could be tough love, a callous appeal to pull your bootstraps up or a comment on news media. There’s plenty of ways to take it, but I like that they all resonate with the way i talk to myself when I’m trying to go to sleep.

Special shout-out to the song titles; they’re some of the most intriguing, antagonistic titles full of attitude, venom and absurdity. Names like Birds Aren’t Real, Brick in a Stocking and Molested by a Jehovah sound like surely there’s some kind of metaphor involved, but at some point in each song they all get pretty literal. There are so many Interesting titles like El Cadaver Incompleto and Poludnica. The latter I found out is a sunstroke spirit that haunts crop fields.

Miracle Healing Crusade takes me back to being scared by music for the first time as a kid. The first time I listened to Marilyn Manson‘s Antichrist Superstar was the first time music ever made me scared in the same way as watching horror movie you were too young for.

You desensitize so quickly that I never really felt quite like that ever again, but the wailing, unhinged assault of Miracle Healing Crusade gave me a nostalgia flashback straight to that shrinking feeling of being embarrassed that you wanted to turn something off to catch your breath and collect your nerves.