The last time that Moon Duo graced a long player, they’d split their impulses up into dark and light – a duality that served them well, giving a showcase to their heavy psych hammer, but also their growing openness to more serene sources. They continue to tap the latter as they ease into the shimmer of Stars Are The Light, an album that finds the band diving into their love of dub’s endless embrace, disco’s euphoric lift, and the more open expanses of psychedelia where the genre invites listeners to loose oneself in sound and let the rhythms infect every pore. This time the tendrils of guitar wind around ever limb and digit. The sound permeates into the bodies systems, swimming in the blood and bile until it’s one with the listener.
The band has always had a pull towards the tendencies of their German Progressive forbears, finding a spot in the cave beside the Düüls (I or II), Guru Guru and Popul Vuh as they bounce sound off the stalactites of your consciousness. This time they go further from the mouth of that cave, letting the sounds disorient and the synths in particular sparkle like secret geodes lighting the way towards serenity. They too have pulled from the slow burn of Spacemen three, but here they seem to follow Sonic Boom on his travels through Spectrum and into the realms of E.A.R. They wind the more experimental production elements in an ache that’s rooted in their search for euphoria.
The shift is startling if listening to just one or two examples shuffled into their past output. Something like the title track, separated from the statement of Stars, when compared to the relative heavy groove back catalog crushers like “Slow Down Low” or “The Death Set” feels like being transported to a whole other planet of sound. Yet the glimmers have always been there – the gauzy strum of “In A Cloud,” the poppy sway of “Circles” – they all feed into what’s working through the veins of Stars Are the Light. Ripley and Sanae have found the balance, sawn off the fuzz yolk that held them fast to the legacy of Wooden Shjips and set themselves adrift into the cosmos here. The record is practically built for headphones as sounds bounce around in 3-dimensional drift, always anchored by the heartbeat skitter of rhythm that pulls the listener out of their shell and into the greater unknown.
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