MOONCREATURES MOONCREATURES EP

It is nice to listen to relaxing music sometimes. It can be easy to become stressed about things, because I suppose there are a lot of stressful things and situations lying around out there - the likelihood of you stumbling on or tripping over on one of these obtuse stressors is quite high. But don't worry, because music - especially that which lies in the field of relaxful chillment - can help. Just sit back and close yer eyes innit, drift off to some nice music. As William Congreve said, "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast" and a savage breast is most certainly caused from gettin' totally stressed out about everything/some things.

Of course, this is not the be-all-and-end-all of music; it's not the POINT of music, for me anyway. The point of music is... well, that's an issue for another day, and probably something really babblesomely philosophical, too. And so I introduce Mooncreatures, a band from London who make the kind of music that could carry you on a rainbow road (definitely not the Mario Kart kind) to dreamland. Well, actually, it's more of a misty road that winds around scenery that is a Gaussian blur of itself, onwards to the long shoreline of sleep.

Their self-titled EP is old-ish, but as I KEEP saying: anything new to me is new. Is it not? Anyway, it was recently released on tape via label Italian Beach Babes, but it sold out. Happily, however, that dreamy stuff is now on bandcamp and free to download. Get to it.

It's a game of three halves, or rather three thirds. Whilst all of it is masked by a heavy and heady dose of dreamy reverb and ever-expanding echoes on guitars, the styles of how this sound is delivered changes. 'Lakedrainers' and 'Coasting' have the same feel, a lean into lo-fi dreampop, a sunny-ish sound; 'Lakedrainers' has a bleak, bright-white sky beauty about it, whilst 'Coasting' seems to me more like angled beams of light cutting through breaks in cloud. Then you have the more distorted shoegaze of 'Balloon Festival' and 'Cattle Camp', the former a jangly-pulsed 80s indie number, the latter a slow-march of melodic feedback.

The last third of the EP is atmospheric ambience - '(Coast Road)' is like the soundtrack to a sunrise, conjuring with its wide modulation an actual coast road, winding and breezy; 'Meet The Ocean' is a slow-down lo-fi Balearic-style melody - think Ibiza in sepia tones. Overall, the whole thing sounds like a journey to the sea and back, however in a typically English way the beauty is bleak, smothered by clouds. Country roads snake through endless green fields towards a beige sand beach, where a grey sea laps weakly at the coast and splashes into jutting black rocks. But there's a beauty in it, something stark and wild, which is what I think has been captured quite nicely by Mooncreatures.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Like Mooncreatures on Facebook
Listen to Mooncreatures on Soundcloud
Hear more Mooncreatures on Myspace
Check Mooncreatures on Tumblr