MoonJune 2013
Giving madness to the method, Belgian art collective expand their span and show it all.
After The Exhibition
There’s a perfect logic in play – or on display. In object-oriented programming, it’s all about class, instance and inheritance, which could dryly sum up this band’s approach to music if it wasn’t so juicy. Just don’t mention Java to MoonJune’s head Leonardo Pavkovic, because his quest of bringing Indonesian music to the forefront of rock has nothing to do with this, the most Eurocentric ensemble on the label’s roster. To sense it, don’t go no further than the second missive on the follow-up to "Stories From The Shed", yet “Spanish Fly” holds much more than a Saracen-visited court dance in its heady, hanging on the unison lines, buzz of an adventurously urban kind – what else could you expect from a group whose leader, guitarist Michel Delville’s surname contains “ville”?
Not for nothing the three-part “Jungle Cow” possesses an intermittently abstract steel-and-glass sheen. Or rather brass-and-glass, for TWO aren’t a quintet anymore but a sextet, with Marti Melia and François Lourtie’s saxes paradoxically tilt the arrangements towards prog rock and away from jazz. So much for the wrongness of it all. The menacing fusion of “Wrong But Not False” may suggest otherwise, yet there’s an immediate sensual assault brought on with opener “Detox Gruel” wherein Pierre Mottet’s bass and mainstay Laurent Delchambre’s drums knit a tight-but-loose web for the reeds and riffs, heavy and vibrant, whereas the vibes by GONG’s Benoît Moerlen add an otherworldly layer to the spiky grace of “Stammtisch” and arresting texture to “Yantra” that ripples with a wave of six strings and Antoine Guenet’s synthesizers.
The latter’s voice engages with Susan Clynes’ vocals on the gentle, piano-propelled “Glass Cubes,” the first conventional, though blissfully swinging in the middle section, song in the band’s repertoire, while, going for a different take on traditional genres, the organ on “Frank Nuts” passes classical weight to the piece’s bluesy reflection. It gets delicious easy once “Flashlight Into Black Hole” charges ahead on the crystal clear melody, yet such a flight defies any entropy one may see in the deceptive disorder of the band’s name and discards any notion of post-modernism in this album’s title. Exciting tension and the small hours release can’t get any better manifestation – sensation in any meaning of the word – than you have right here.
*****
