Short Reviews [Moon Goose - 2020 - "The Wax Monster Lives Behind the First Row of Trees"]

The initial vinyl pressing of the latest Moon Goose album has already sold out, so the guys have made another limited run available (in a different colour), and anyone into psychedelic space rock really should be seeking this out (also available digitally through Bandcamp). I am a real fan of this band, not only for the superb music they keep producing, but also for their sense of humour. According to them, “the record is best understood as a piece of bricolage held together by a childhood ghost, manifesting in such diverse places as a Vietnamese Banknote and an imaginary cave on the Iowa border. The music can be enjoyed quite loud, fairly late in the day, accompanied by a human sundae machine if available, on board a fungal transport if possible.” So, there you have it. On this album we are treated with five mostly instrumental tracks, plus four micro tracks (“short enough to be used to TikTok videos”) where three are under 30 seconds and one stretches to 40. As with their last album, the excellent ‘’Source Code’, here we have a band taking psychedelic era Pink Floyd, throwing in plenty of Hawkwind plus some Can, to create music which is tripping, powerful, and designed to be played late at night with lava lamps and wax light shows. This really is music from another time and place, and should not exist 50 years after its heyday, but not only does it exist, it is getting better. While the rhythm section keeps it tight, often playing the same repeated motif, it allows the guitars and keyboards to move and swirl into weird and wonderful directions. The micro tracks are not really tasters or musical mouthwash, they are part of something bigger which has been edited for this purpose. “It Ain’t True” is the penultimate song on the album and it is something of a shock as it contains vocals, and feels are more art rock punk in manner, with long held-down organ chords while the guitars crunch over the top. This has a live feel to it, with the feeling that the band and instruments are going to spontaneously combust at any minute. The last song, “South Popular Guy”, is the strangest on the album, as we have a voiceover telling a story with the music gradually building as it becomes more and more weird. The music and the words combine to create something quite unsettling, and then after the story ends the music gradually fades away into nothingness. It certainly creates a feeling of “what on earth did I just listen to?”, and in many ways that sums up the album as it changes and shifts, not following fickle mainstream or media, but instead creating music and art very much on their own terms.