Lime Lizard Review
Moonshake, Big Good Angel (Too Pure) 9+
Moonshake make astonishing music; a dense and detailed rush of sounds that can be either oppressively claustrophobic or open sky-wide with airy chimes and flutterings. They make music that is complex but never chaotic: there is a tension in their control of sounds, a sense of things pulling apart, teetering on the verge of cacophony, but holding together-just, just. It's that clenched, impossibly drawn-out moment before a balloon bursts.
The six songs on this mini-album are held down by dubby bass and pummeling percussion. Over this insistent tightness all manner of noises hover and flit: at times, like the orchestrated aerial turns and twists of flocking birds, they work in synch; at others they crash headlong or glance uneasily off each other. There are strange clatterings. Bleeps, swoops and long warbling phrases nag disconcertingly over the frantic restlessness of the bass and drums. Sinister tinkling and snatches of distorted brass bring further confusion.
Big Good Angel is a step on from last year's Eva Luna. Then the sound was much heavier, with everything constantly at full-tilt. Now the band show a lighter touch. There are very few discernible guitars on Angel, and this unusual absence opens up a space for experimentations with samples and noises that can be tweaked and twiddled into ever more bizarre combinations. The only other band I've heard doing anything this contrary is avant-techno four piece Tortus, although some of the percussion on Angel shares its freshness with (label-mates) Pram's debut EP Iron Lung.
Dave Callahan and Margaret Fiedler have three songs each here. Callahan's sneering tones galumph cynically through social injustices -- here a man who feels truly hard done by, embittered, and ill at ease in the city. His subjects are similarly used and abused by modern urban life: a "crummy creep from the sticks" on "Capital Letters," bruised by the false promises of the metropolis; a widower cheated by a charlatan medium ("Séance"); and poverty-struck parents who are picked on by God-squad social workers ('Still only one more left to snatch/For the kid consignment/The publicity batch") on "Helping Hands."
Fiedler's songs are lyrically less heavy-handed, less stolidly rooted in social concerns. On Eva Luna she was barely audible, her whisperings necessitating frequent consultation of the lyric sheet. Now she is opening her mouth and singing, her breathy timidity replaced by a new boldness both in her vocal style and her lyrics. The opening "Two Trains" in particular, reveals a provocative PJ Harvey streak: "I'm whining (nagging and nervous)/I'm compulsive (frivolous)/Overweight and hairy/Don't' you wanna meet me?" While on "Girly Loop" there is talk of wild women, who "know what God gave them eyelashes for." Like Polly Harvey, she is playing around with stereotyped images of women.
Moonshake are a tease: to tease is to vex, to agitate, to ridicule playfully, to loosen and pull apart. They do all this, and in so doing create exhilarating (at times absurd) music that catches you off guard and shakes you into attentiveness.
-- Lucy Cage
