Moon Duo started as a side project of Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada of San Francisco’s Wooden Shjips. However since their second full length album, Mazes (2011), they’ve become a wholly separate, and in my opinion, better entity. While they may have a more singular sound than Wooden Shjips, basically a combination of German kosmische motorik beats, early electro experimentalists Silver Apples, early Stooges, New York pre-punkers Suicide and 80s psych bands like Loop and Spacemen 3, it’s consistently addictive, and evolves just a bit with each release.
The cool, subdued vocals and relatively hooky melodies and riffs set them apart from other bands in this sub-genre like Psychic Ills and Cave. Just like the colorful album cover, Circles expands on their monochromatic sonic palette into something more varied and memorable. The melodies stand out particularly on title track “Circles,” which the Velvets would have been proud of, and the lovely “Trails.” “Sleepwalker,” featured in their first video, rocks harder than usual. Johnson reigns in his guitar solos into concise bursts, the fuzzy tones creating a delicious counterpart to the digital rhythms.
Lyrics are hard to discern, but supposedly the album is inspired by an 1841 essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson called ‘Circles’, inspiring appropriately deep and trippy ruminations such as “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” Whether deep listening with good headphones and trying to decipher lyrics or playing in the background while working, I found myself craving more by the end of the album, and ended up putting the entire Moon Duo catalog on a playlist, including their short first album <i>Escape</i> (2010) and <i>Killing Time</i> EP (2009). That still adds up to just 2 hours, 18 minutes. Hopefully there will be more to come.
