Album Review: Moon Duo – Live in Ravenna
Courtesy of Ilia Rogatchevski
★★★
Swirling Fates hover over the hairy San Franciscan love triangle. These witches are organised and brutal, but offer kind words to the deaf. The ram at the back of the pyramid beats his medallion breast, ensuring the grazing ewe’s attention is fixed on his erection. Cheap speed thrills the bearded angel with murder on his mind. Howling truths open up like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up hesitant opponents with reckless abandon. Foot of the cave. A battered Ripley Johnson stumbles out from the mouth of the labyrinth, clutching a string of soiled twine in one hand and the dripping head of the beast in the other. North Korean school girls in the audience, free in their conformity, dance in unison; flying red handkerchiefs; mourning the dead.
The nature of live albums is a strange and fickle one. Arguably, live albums benefit the bands more than the average consumer. A live recording cannot be said to act as a decent introduction to an artist. Only the studio record, or the performance itself can do that. The purpose of a live recording is to chase down and pin to the kerb a moment in a particular band’s history. Live albums serve as a document of the performance, much in the same way that film or photography serve to document performance art. Very rarely should they be regarded as significant opuses in their own right. Can, famously produced a wealth of live recordings, which were later edited in the studio. Jimi Hendrix recorded an album full of new experimental material, mapping out his transition from hard rock to funk and R&B. The former used the live recording as a creative tool in its own right, while the latter needed to fulfil a contractual obligation. In this particular case, we witness Moon Duo ditch the drum machine, in favour of man-machine John Jeffrey, and attempt to chronicle this evolutionary stage in their career with fuzzy fervour. A moment in history.
There was a point, a couple of years ago, when Moon Duo appeared to be a curiously shaped satellite orbiting the Wooden Shjips exoplanet. Time has seen this satellite grow to unprecedented breadths and surprise casual observes and seasoned astronomers alike, (they will be playing the Queen Elisabeth Hall on 19 September – that’s where real artists perform, projections and all). Their music, while essentially exploring a formula identical to the one first concocted by Wooden Shjips, is perhaps more dynamic, if not superior in quality. This is probably due to Sanae Yamada’s influence: propagating electronic malady over guitar-orientated machismo.
By the sound of it, Mediterranean crowds seem to behave themselves at rock concerts, unlike their fellow conspirators from Albion. It must have been a hot day. Or perhaps, their passions were muted in favour of sonic continuity. With respect to the recording itself, the mix is balanced well. The guitars are zen-like in their entropy, the keyboard melodies are audible and feline, while the percussive rhythms are prominent, splenetic and occasionally unpredictable. Having had the good fortune to see Moon Duo perform during this particular tour, this present writer has to admit that some of the energy got lost in translation. Maybe that is to be expected when listening to a document rather than experiencing the event.
Moon Duo are currently on tour and Live in Ravenna is out now via Sacred Bones Records.
