Originally
published in Skyscraper
Hardly six months after the release
of their last proper album, Romantica, Luna are treating us with
an EP, Close Cover Before Striking. At nine albums now, that makes
for almost an album a year since 1992. Not too shabby.
Close Cover is a solid, even installment in the
Luna canon, offering a couple of covers and a handful of originals.
The EP opens with chiming guitars on “Astronaut,”
as catchy and accessible a Luna song as ever. “I’ll
wear a stylin’ moustache; you’ll wear a frozen smile,”
Dean Wareham deadpans, his voice soggy with weltschmerz. If “Astronaut”
is decidedly upbeat, much of the rest of the EP unfurls in a hushed
lazy curl. An exercise adolescent lust and anxiety, “Teenage
Lightning” begins simply with some low-key strumming and
vocals and, then, is Wareham really singing, “Put my hand
inside your pants”? Sure enough. “I can hypnotize
a pancake,” he continues, “I can levitate the Pope.”
To drop these riotous lines and still sound so perfectly jaded
demands a truly matchless strain of lyrical balance. If you count
his Galaxie 500 days, Wareham’s been doing this for three
decades now, but the lines still sound fresh.
Luna offers a reverent cover of the Stones’
“Waiting on a Friend, ” managing, nonetheless, to
make their version slower, almost caught in amber. The band’s
cover of Kraftwerk’s “Neon Lights” is a surprising
trippy highlight, too, replete with gorgeous bassline and squawking
guitars. You’d hardly guess the song’s krautrock origins.
We’re also treated to an instrumental, “Drunken Whistler,”
and a couple of videos for “Lovedust” and “1995.”
A real gem for Luna fans, Close Cover is hazy,
slo-mo stroll through melancholy and inertia—tales of languor,
of waiting around, and of getting ready to go.
Still the best band making drowsy sophisticated
rock out there.
Robert Stribley
Official
Web site
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