When the music leads you into strange lands and genre categorisations start to feel like a near-impossibility, thank the heavens for Luna Honey who save us from wandering the streets at night, lost in perplexed reflection.
What is this? We might ask ourselves. Partly electronic, partly organic. Allusions to mysticism, esoteric subjects and ritualistic motifs keep popping up. Sometimes the music is willfully abrasive, at other times soothing and drifting. One minute this could be playing in a Twin Peaks diner scene, the next soundtracking goth kids in shades stalking a basement bar for their fix of Siouxsie & The Banshees.
So thank you Luna Honey for helping to place latest album Bound (Self released). In their own worlds, this is Experimental Dark Rock music.
Since their 2018 debut, Peace Will Grind You Down, the core trio of Maura Pond, Benjamin Schurr, and Levi Flack have been creating mysterious sonic landscapes that incorporate varied electronic textures, samples and tape loops together with various organic percussion, strings, brass (and whatever else they fancy). Sometimes it’s more ambient and floating, at other times more rhythmic and Alt-Rock-centric. With all their musical shape-shifting, one sonic constant is the striking voice of Pond. Not exactly mournful, or soothing, or angry, it’s… ambiguous.
Bound starts in particularly abrasive fashion with thumping drums, feedback and Pond sounding at her most intense and ragged on “Kerosine”. The churning discomfort of “Vacuum Cleaner” follows, as Pond’s voice sears through the skies, like the possessed spirit of latter-day Scott Walker.
These two tracks though seem to be more an initiation, rather than a taste of what is to come. From this point on the mood becomes more reflective, the music more calm, sometimes driven by cool, smooth basslines (as on the Jarboe-reminiscent Alt-Rock of “Lemon”) and Pond in places evoking a Nordic woman standing on the plains, singing to the horses.
Towards the back end of the album the electronic textures come to the fore in their otherworldliness. On “Gravity”, for example, the band could almost pass for Songs to Play in the Dark-era Coil, as though they were collectively summoning the spirit of Jhonn Balance (and they seem like the types that might).
With the aforementioned Jarboe comparisons (and the band having recently collaborated with former Swans guitarist Norman Westberg) it shouldn’t be surprising that Luna Honey seem to have incorporated a Michael Gira motif into their music here — namely: songs that don’t resolve themselves. The title track may be the most impressively intense example, as a simple, deep bass pulse accompanies a moody drone and solemn vocals, the whole thing building, but never quite releasing.
It’s not entirely clear what Luna Honey’s intentions are. What do they want from us? Are they bound? Are we bound? And what’s that instrument on the album cover going to be used for? Maybe some questions can remain unanswered.
Buy the album here:
https://lunahoney.bandcamp.com/album/bound
8 / 10
TOM OSMAN
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