Luna

Quicksilver guitars rush and roar. The guy you’re standing next to at the bar mutters out of the corner of his mouth, “I don’t know what you’re saying… but I hate it anyway.” Is this the place? You’re living on a diet of stale cigarettes and warm beer and maybe, today, you’re not in the same time zone that you were yesterday… welcome to “Chinatown”, the leadoff track of PENTHOUSE, the latest release from Luna.

Dean Wareham, who has a penchant for effulegnt guitar solos, also wears his mordant wit on his sleave. On the sublime “Lost in Space” Luna combines black humor with the aching regret of a thousand hangovers. The fragile melody rings like a bell and Wareham assures us that we deserve “time off… for good behavior”.

Luna has exquisite range. Consider the juxtaposition of “Moon Palace”; a song which is a melange of not-so-popular cultural references (to fallen spy Christopher Boyce, a nod to Paul Auster and a guitar solo by Tom Verlaine) and “Rhythm King”; a sarcastic beat-driven footstomper which offers a sincere prayer that Richard Nixon’s death be continuous and everlasting. Luna’s eclecticism can be accounted for by its various members’ distinguished musical pasts:

Dean Wareham was the leader of Galaxie 500, one of the seminal bands to first navigate the post-mod orbit. Stanley Demeski once played in a band called the Feelies. Here was a band to get worked up about. A typical Feelies gig would end with Stanley being smothered under a deluge of flowers. Justin Harwood played in the New Zealand group known as the Chills. His bass playing is the aural equivalent of reading Mickey Spillane by lightning flash. Sead Eden, the lone Canadian, is a man of wonderful mathematic capacities. And yes, he can play the guitar.

The subject matter of Luna’s songs can be found, on any given day, in the pockets of Dean Wareham. He scribbles notes to himself on candy bar wrappers and match book covers. He often does not complete a song until laundry day, when all the odd jottings are collected and collated. Like the collage artist Joseph Cornell, he wanders the streets of lower Manhattan amassing detail and experience; synthesizing pop-gems from the minutiae and miscellany of daily life.

Luna was formed following the dissolution of Galaxie 500 in 1992. Wareham met Harwood at the dog races in Bath, England. They developed an immediate rapport. When informed that cult faves, the Feelies, were no more, Wareham made a phone call to New Jersey.

“Stanley, you don’t know me, but, you’re in my band…”
“Oh really… what’s it called?”
Wareham flipped through his worn-out tarot cards and replied:
“uhh… Luna.”

After recording LUNAPARK it was agreed that the band would benefit from the addition of a forth player. The redoubtable Sean Eden was brought into the fold and the band embarked on a rigorous schedule of touring. In support of LUNAPARK and BEWITCHED the band has played with such rock luminaries as the Screaming Trees, The Velvet Underground, and the Cocteau Twins. Look for them to maintain their hectic, globetrotting lifestyle with the release of their new album, due out some time in July (sorry, no title yet!).

On Penthouse, the divine Tom Verlaine, the genius of Television, plays guitar on “23 Minutes in Brussels” and the aforementioned “Moon Palace”. A special treat on the album is the unlisted bonus track, “Bonnie & Clyde”. Released in the UK as a single, this track is sung in French by Wareham and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier. The original version featured Brigitte Bardot and the eminent Serge Gainbourg.

Luna’s genius as a modern rock band is made up of a thousand-and-one little observations, modeled upon a series of tiny incidents which they have been gathering collectively since grade school, remembering them with vivid disinctness and using them on stage and on record when the occasion demands.