Moonshake

Had it come out in 2003 or so, in the midst of the post-punk revival, there would have been no problem filing it away. Nor would there be today. It's just that, appearing at a time when indie music was moving within the usual rock clichés, with grunge and britpop ruling the roost, "Eva Luna" ended up filed under post-rock, alongside a whole series of artists at odds with rock as commonly understood.

But for them, Moonshake, especially when compared to those artists at odds with rock as commonly understood, the post-rock label didn't really fit. In short, it was misleading.

It happened roughly twenty years ago. While every music magazine was mourning the passing of Kurt Cobain, in May 1994 The Wire, as if nothing were going on, published the article that christened and mapped out post-rock. Disco Inferno, Insides, Seefeel, Main, Kevin Martin - the groups, all English and nearly all orbiting Too Pure, analyzed and held up as paradigms by Simon Reynolds, alongside a further string of names that, between Bark Psychosis and Stereolab, also included Moonshake.

The essence of those pages lay in the overhaul that said groups were bringing to rock, elevating the recording studio to a creative laboratory and turning the guitar, stripped of legitimacy, into an instrument freed from every riff. And not least, the use of new technologies borrowed from hip-hop, dub techniques and a nod to certain strands of electronic music (we're in the midst of the Warp boom) are, according to Reynolds, the tangible signs of change. There were also rock dissidents like Velvet Underground or the revival - after years of oblivion - of kraut-rock and Canterbury prog, right up to certain more reckless strands of post-punk, but by and large the message was of a laboratory-style rock that preferred the approach of Brian Eno to that of any old Jimmy Page.

In essence, an approach more cerebral than physical. Music that was undoubtedly new and multifaceted. Not so for Moonshake.

Second half of the Eighties. On one side The Wolfhounds, on the other Ultra Vivid Scene. The former, out of the C86 scene, eminently Smiths-indebted, were fronted by singer Dave Callahan. The latter, essentially the vehicle for leader Kurt Ralske, counted among their ranks a certain Margaret Fiedler. With Wolfhounds shelved, Callahan met Fiedler through an ad in Melody Maker, she by then out of Ultra Vivid Scene: no sooner had John Frenett and Miguel Moreland been brought on board than the embryo of Moonshake was formed.

With a name already evocative in its own right, borrowed from the identically titled Can track, in 1991 the quartet made their debut on none other than Creation - a label that had indeed proven itself, since the epic-scale gestation of the "Loveless" affair was coming out right around that same time - but launched together with it. Four tracks, those of the extended "First", which nonetheless owe far too much to Kevin Shields and co. and poorly outline the combo's intentions. Indeed, shortly after, they would move to Too Pure.

Between "Secondhand Clothes" and the previous extended EP only a few months pass, even though they feel like years. Then, with "Eva Luna" in 1992, the chrysalis becomes a butterfly.

What the four of them do is nothing less than take up the groove (funk, dub, jazz) as taught by Public Image Ltd, Pop Group, Rip Rig & Panic, weigh it down with an industrial aftertaste, and project it into the 90s. A lesson both musical and intellectual, playing but above all thinking like them. That's why, besides not being foundational or intrusive (if anything, they're borderline superfluous), the samples on "Sweetheart" or "Mugshot" feel more like a John Lydon or Mark Stewart move than anything shared with Disco Inferno or Insides, for whom sampling was instead a defining stylistic trait. Or take the dub of "Bleach And Salt Water", again, and even more so, Lydon/Stewart rather than Kevin Martin.

In short, of Reynolds' insights, the Moonshake of "Eva Luna" honored only the post-punk principle, sidestepping everything else; not least because, in the end, much of that "everything else" - dub, unconventional guitars, the break with tradition - had already been worked out by post-punk itself.

Another difference from the aforementioned peers lies in the length of the songs. While still far from the idea of post-rock as a new progressive, there was a tendency to spin things out over the long haul, creating a hypnotic sense of perception unfolding in real time, whereas here the songs play out in short form: the catchy "City Poison" (Pil in a pop vein with vocals somewhere between Lydon and Gordon Gano), the torrential "Spaceship Earth" (rain-like guitars with a touch of shoegazing), or the tribal "Wanderlust" (Rip Rig & Panic meeting, naturally, the Can of "Halleluhwah"), always with Callahan on the mic, never run past the five-minute mark. Same goes for "Tar Baby" (again, Rip Rig & Panic lurking just around the corner) and "Little Thing" (the one episode where the samples take the upper hand, creating an alienating noir mood), when it's Fiedler on vocals instead.

Moonshake in their classic line-up, which also included Terry Edwards on saxophone and Yvette Lacey on flute, close the book here. The following "The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow", from 1994, guitar-free, would find Callahan flanked by trusty Moreland and Raymond Dickaty's saxophone, while Fiedler and Frenett, at the same time, would go on to form Laika.

Starting from 1994, if placing a group like Seefeel or Disco Inferno in the past is a hard task, it's easy enough to picture Moonshake on some random day in the late 80s. But today, while Seefeel and Disco Inferno sound unmistakably dated, Moonshake still feel as fresh as the first time around.

It's probably no coincidence that post-rock à la Reynolds - which, in fairness, lasted little more than the blink of an eye before being overtaken shortly after by the American model - has long since vanished without a trace, while post-punk never stops teaching us something new.

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18/08/2013