Moon Duo – Escape LP
(Woodsist, 2010)

Lately, I have not been able to get enough of San Francisco’s Wooden Shjips. Their newest LP, Dos (Holy Mountain, 2009), is a modern psychedelic masterpiece and rarely stays in the shop for more than a week. It’s usually forced on a friend or regular who swings into the shop without something specific in mind. I also have a huge soft spot in my heart for the cold, paranoid sounds of NYC’s Suicide. Their 1977 debut is still a little mind-boggling and still ahead of its time.

Anyway, this brings us now to San Francisco’s Moon Duo. Moon Duo is Erik Johnson, guitarist for Wooden Shjips, and Sanae Yamada. With the Duo they’ve combined the best elements of both the above bands. Last year they released two 12″ EPs that were absolutely mesmerizing, dark and extremely gritty. Two weeks ago, Woodsist brought us their debut full length, Escape. This duo reeks clouds of hypnotic, cold haze swirling with piercing guitar tones created from the natural atonal surge of overloaded feedback. Oh, the beauty of despair.

The keyboards and percussion are stretched deep within valleys of reverb and lock into dark, steady rhythmic patterns which lay a dense, sonic soundscape for what’s to come. The guitar lines are propelled snaky, semi-agitated and psychedelic into an unsure, shaky foreground. I don’t really know how they nailed it, but the vocals, whenever they do actually make an appearance, are lost somewhere in the space created between the fuzzed guitars and dubbed out rhythm base.

Moon Duo – In the Trees

You like Ayler? You like Velvet Underground? You like Suicide? Or you just can’t stop collecting that Wooden Shjips-related material? This is for you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 9:51 pm and is filed under New Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.