Short Reviews [ Moon Goose - 2024 - "Murmurations"]

Many of you will be aware that my home is in one part of New Zealand, but I work in another, only getting back every other weekend. So when a package arrives my wife opens it when we are on one of our daily video calls and shows me what is inside so when an envelope arrived she did the same as normal, and was somewhat surprised to see there were 9 cards inside as well as the disc. Given they were numbered on one side she laid them out in sequence, showing me each one. They were related to the tracks on the album, of which there are 8, with the ninth being a photo of the band. But on the back, there was writing, so she then turned them over and read the story of the last flight of the Moon Goose. She also noticed that some of the letters were in red as opposed to black, and when looking at them in sequence it formed an ominous message, “The Moon Goose is dead”. Some bands are subtle in their messaging, others not so much, but this appears to be giving a very strong comment that possibly the band is no more? I truly hope that is not the case as yet again the Welsh nutters have created something very special indeed as they move from psychedelia to space rock to progressive to Shadows-style guitar to 70’s rock and everything in between. If one goes to their website and reads the ‘About’ section this is what they will find, “Moon Goose put Space, Psych, Prog and Motorik in a bag, shook it, poked it, burned it, then spread the ashes from the top of the Welsh Mountains with the wind in their face until their eyes were crying black tears. It’s the sound of a dragon colliding with an asteroid. If you enjoy things like gneiss, spores, and strange ideas followed through to an illogical conclusion, you’ll love Moon Goose.” This is not a band who should be in existence in 2024, as this sounds far more as if they are from Seventies years earlier and while there are times when the music is clear and directed there are others when it is fuzzed and distorted as it gets inside the brain. There is clarity yet there is also distortion, and in many ways, it is as if they are the bastard child of Hawkwind and Man, with early Floyd somewhere in the mix. This is music which is refusing to conform, taking inspiration from bands and combing them into something quite new and I am sure the repeated riffs get right inside the brain when experienced in the live environment. I said their last album, 2022’s ‘La Nuit’, was superb and this has definitely taken it up a notch. For fans of psychedelic progressive space rock which moves and swirls all over the place as they follow that spaceship, it rarely gets much better than this. Let us hope the message is yet another joke, as this is just way too good to be an epitaph.