-1995

Quicksilver guitars rush and roar. The guy you're standing next to at the bar mutters out of the corner of his mouth : "I don't know what you're saying, but I hate it anyway." Is this the place ? "Have you been out all night" ... "Were you late to work ... Did you go home early ?" You're living on a diet of stale cigarettes and warm beer and maybe, today, you're not in the same time zone that you were yesterday ... Welcome to "Chinatown", the leadoff track of Penthouse, Luna's new album.

"One has to commit a painting," said Degas, "the way one commits a crime." If the same axiom applied to rock music, the members of Luna would all be career criminals. Dean Wareham has a penchant for effulgent guitar solos and he wears his mordant wit on his sleeve. On the sublime "Lost In Space", Luna combine black humour with the aching regret of a thousand hangovers. The fragile melody rings like a bell, and Wareham assures us that we deserve "time off ... for good behaviour."

Luna has exquisite range. Consider the juxtaposition of "Moon Palace" - a melange of not-so-popular cultural references (to Christopher Boyce (fallen spy) and Paul Auster (oblique novelist)) - and "Rhythm King", a sarcastic beat-box driven footstomper which offers a sincere prayer that Richard Nixon's death be continuous and everlasting. That eclecticism can be accounted for by the various members, and their various pasts.


Dean Wareham (guitar / vox) was the leader of Galaxie 500, which to conjure, even for a moment, is like trying to gather the hyacinth colours of the distance into your arms.
Stanley Demeski (drums) once played in a band called The Feelies. Here was a band to get worked up about. A typical Feelies gig would end with Stanley being smothered under a deluge of flowers. (Stanley left the band in Summer 1996)

Justin Harwood (bass) played in the New Zealand group known as The Chills. His bass playing is the aural equivalent of reading Mickey Spillane by lightning flash.

Sean Eden (guitar), the lone Canadian, is a man of wonderful mathematic capabilities. You might give him the circumference of a wheel, and he will tell you how many revolutions it would make in going around the globe.

The subject matter of Luna's songs can be found, on any given day, in Dean Wareham's pockets. He scribbles notes to himself on candy bar wrappers and match book covers. Often, a song isn't finished until laundry day, when the jottings are collected and collated. Like the collage artist Joseph Cornell, he wanders the streets of lower Manhattan amassing detail and experience, synthesising pop gems from the minutiae and miscellany of daily life.

Luna was formed following the dissolution of Galaxie 500 in 1992. Wareham first met Harwood at Bath dog track, and the two developed an immediate rapport. When he found out that The Feelies were no more, Wareham put in a call to New Jersey : "Stanley, you don't know me, but you're in my new band ..."

"Oh, really ... what's it called ?"

Wareham flipped through his worn Tarot cards and replied :

"Uh ... Luna"

After recording Lunapark, it was agreed that the band would benefit from the addition of a fourth member. The redoubtable Sean Eden was brought into the fold and Luna embarked on a rigorous schedule of touring. In support of Lunapark and Bewitched, they played with The Screaming Trees, The Velvet Underground and The Cocteau Twins. Look for them to maintain their hectic, globetrotting, lifestyle following the release of Penthouse.

Penthouse features contributions from the divine Tom Verlaine, who plays guitar on "Moon Palace" and "23 Minutes In Brussels". A special treat is the unlisted hidden track - the band's universally acclaimed version of "Bonnie And Clyde", on which Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier plays the Brigitte Bardot to Dean Wareham's Serge Gainsbourg.

I could regale you with paragraph on paragraph of relevant detail ... how "Sideshow By The Seashore" chronicles Justin Harwood's unhappy experiences tuning a theremin, or how Sean Eden ended up making strange dog noises on Bonnie And Clyde. Instead I think it is more important that Luna's genius as a modern rock band is made up of a thousand and one observations, modelled upon a series of tiny incidents which they have been gathering collectively since grade school, remembering with vivid distinctness, and using on stage and on record when the occasion demands.

- Bucky Wunderlick, NYC