First up then comes the third album from The Early Years. Although much belated in its arrival — following on from 2016’s Sonic Cathedral-curated II and 2006’s Beggars Banquet-delivered eponymous debut — Modern Moonlight doesn’t display any signs of creative lethargy, despite the band’s album-per-decade dispensing routines. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Somewhat liberated by establishing their own studio set-up, Modern Moonlight possesses a new found combination of looseness, freshness and directness that expands The Early Years modus operandi beyond prior formulations, whilst still signifying a laudable sense of continuity.
Hence, Brian Eno’s late-’70s creative dalliances with David Bowie continue to be reenvisaged strongly in key passages, notably in the shape of the Lodger-like gliding and giddiness of “A New Way Of Living”, “The River” and “The Gift”. Elsewhere, sideways and diagonal shifts occur. This gives us welcome strong echoes of the skewed-art-pop of Shearwater’s evocative Jet Plane And Oxbow (“Get Up Get Down” and “Shimmering Stone”); traces of Radiohead’s most symphonic studies (“Heaven Over There”); and strands of mid-period Talk Talk (“Tired Eyes” and the title track).
Densely packed but never cluttered, the multi-dimensional Modern Moonlight is arguably the finest The Early Years LP to date. We will likely have to wait until 2036 though to see if they can eclipse it.
Producing a considerably larger amount of discography entries over the last decade in comparison, across a variety of outlets, Martin Jenkins returns to Sonic Cathedral under his primary Pye Corner Audio alias for a de facto follow-up to 2022’s Let’s Emerge!
Having supplied more overtly experimentalist affairs via Ghost Box and Quiet Details in the intervening years, More Songs About The Sun leans further into fashioning material aimed unswervingly at fans of the label in hand. Featuring Ride’s Andy Bell as an accomplice once again in a handful of passages, Jenkins has fashioned a twelve-track suite that soothes as much as it soars, with a newly inviting sense of warmth and accessibility.
Thus we’re treated to the nominatively determined “Euphoria” — with its gorgeous solarised spin on Musik Von Harmonia sound melding — as an arresting opener. Thereafter, we’re taken through a Field Lines Cartographer-meets-Spacemen 3 interstellar odyssey (“Analogue Dreams”); a hyper-pulsing yet lysergic dreamscape including Jenkins’ own rare vocals floating up top (“Cycle”); and ambient-techno blissfulness (“Eight Thousand Years”).
Best aired loudly – but not punishingly so — on an appropriately cloud-free summer afternoon, More Songs About The Sun is a satisfyingly radiant broadcast from the house of Pye Corner Audio.
-Adrian-
