Too Pure / Beggars Arkive
Moonshake’s linchpins David Callahan and Margaret Fiedler gave it their all here, alternating the vocal / songwriting fisticuffs, Fiedler’s softer atmospherics often swamped by Callahan’s shouty preference. Artistic differences that by the time the next album The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow hit would lead her to jump ship for Laika along with bass guitarist John Frenett; but for now the chemistry was capslock toasty.
The raw energy of
Eva Luna was and still is an utterly satisfying listen, especially if life has dealt you a nasty surprise or two and you really need to vent. Each song kilter-kittens the frustration out of that snotty swizzle with plenty of unruly spanners and
razor-tight acidics. The roughed-up junkyard of “Sweetheart”, or that bloody-nosed lyrical shove of “City Poison” flying the fictive scrape of a subway train, the barest thread of ‘musicality’ holding each din-diving dispute loosely in place. The ram-shackled sketchbook quality of the artwork fitting perfectly with the sonics, its scribbled out lyrical misdemeanours like squashed spiders.
Man… it’s great to have this back in my lugholes, it really is. Those spiky slants and clatter-clustered stomps are to die for. The mangled genius of “Tar Baby”’s acidically challenged moments grenade-grinning you silly. The coutured chaos of “Beautiful Pigeon”, its dustbin-drizzled din zimmering the zag in a fretted exotica of coat-hangered shards, each song’s
confident swagger making you feel ten foot tall. Even when dialling it back on “Blister” and the noir- thrown “Beeside”, they still manage to hijack you with a queasy investigative itch.
Eva Luna is one of those albums you need in your life, unapologetic and triumphant, its squabbling layers gristling your head like an unholy hangover. Firmly shaking the mundane clean away as your jangling body is happily hot-wired to this puppeteer’s twisted whims.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
Moonshake’s linchpins David Callahan and Margaret Fiedler gave it their all here, alternating the vocal / songwriting fisticuffs, Fiedler’s softer atmospherics often swamped by Callahan’s shouty preference. Artistic differences that by the time the next album The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow hit would lead her to jump ship for Laika along with bass guitarist John Frenett; but for now the chemistry was capslock toasty.
