Daniel Romano

All right there’s a dense backstory on this album if you appreciate pontification, but it all boils down to the fact that Daniel Romano — one of the most prolific artists of the last five years— has spun the Rolodex on genres and begun his concept album period. The record, somewhere between rock opera and chamber-prog territory, is a suite of twelve songs meant to be consumed to completion. The band, as limber as ever, seems set to take on the task. Added to the band’s usual sweeping compositions and omnivorous influences, La Luna embraces sonorous strings and the gilded fanfare of brass. The album rises and sets with a flourish, larger than life intros and outros that push the album past its glam tendencies and pop excess towards a grandiosity that Romano has only hinted at in the past.

Even if the bookends are jettisoned, the album itself isn’t short on drama, the songs culling from Queen, The Pretty Things, ELP, Todd Rundgren, and Sparks for a record that understands that the ecstatic volume of 2022 must be met head on with equal excess in order to hold the listeners’ attention. Romano’s songs blossom into a sea of colors, each movement as dazzling as the next. Romano has long found himself able to traverse genre like hopping over state lines, but here he finds more comfort in blurring rather than blending in. There are shades of his pop, country, folk, and psych touches, but the lines that separate one from the other have all begun to dissolve on La Luna. The record is one of Romano’s biggest swings, but he lands the blow as steady as ever. The chameleon comes out of hiding and once in the sun he lays down an opus that’s tender even as it’s tumultuous.

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