Moonbabies - "Moonbabies at the Ballroom"

Moonbabies - The 9th (Parasol 2007)

Moonbabies - Moonbabies at the Ballroom / Parasol

One of the great things about not being in charge at a university radio station is not knowing everything. Maybe that sounds strange as being a blogger is all about knowing more than every other blogger; hell, music fandom is about knowing more than anyone else sometimes. It's what separates elitists from mere mortal enthusiasts and the especially cringeworthy casual fan. After a certain point of doing this, you start to think you know it all. It's like, not even worth keeping up anymore.

Sometimes I feel like I've hit that wall; shortly before I left for an historic vacation last week, I tried to review a lot; I stopped when I felt I was no longer doing the artists justice. After returning, I started back in with Moonbabies. It was good to be home again. If you've never heard of this band, drop everything you're doing and go find The Orange Billboard. As an undergrad just taking leftovers from the music office that Michael and Jordan ran, Moonbabies slipped into my hands in late 2004 and became a favorite album that year, a shimmering pastiche of Swede-pop smeared together with shoegaze and dream-pop. At that point, Ola Frick and Carina Johansson perfectly encapsulated who I was as a person. It was naive, but it was naive with a self-knowing wink and nudge. The music was shiny enough to be goofy but came off smart enough to know what it was. Self-awareness. Bloggers love that stuff.

The mini-LP War on Sound followed a dramatic excursion to London and when I came back I found that while I had changed quite a bit, Moonbabies hadn't dramatically altered their sound for their third big release (which included curious yet welcome covers of Pink Floyd's "Arnold Layne" and Midnight Oil's "Stars of Warburton"). Sure they still had the white noise wash of My Bloody Valentine and had wisely kept the vocal harmonies of The Beach Boys. But a Midnight Oil cover? Well played. Though it didn't blow anyone into the weeds (except the people in charge of soundtracking "Grey's Anatomy"), War on Sound was a holding pattern for their following release.

So you see that I'm starting to sound like I don't know anything with these trite phrases and nondescript terminology. That's the effect the Swedish duo have on me: I regress into my stupidly happy late '04 phase when things like "white noise wash" passed as acceptable descriptions for distortion, feedback and overmodulation. Moonbabies at the Ballroom is, unsurprisingly, not a whole lot different from its predecessors. So why bother?

It's true that topping The Orange Billboard might well be impossible. But whereas that album was near flawless because its songs were so strong, it was succinct in delivery. Moonbabies at the Ballroom is a different approach and the opening instrumental "21st Century" is the first indication: Whereas a song like "Jets" was a legitimate instrumental in its own right, "21st Century" suggests a more freeform approach, an opening to the album proper but not necessarily a song to be taken on its own. "War on Sound" makes another appearance after having been released as a single over a year ago. Its near militant drums juxtapose Johansson's airy vocal delivery before breaking into the cute indie-pop verse.

One of the things about their songs is that Ola Frick's accent sometimes gets the best of him (pronouncing his Rs quite hard in words like "better," for example). It makes for a vocal tic that you know as unmistakeably Moonbabies, but it comes delivered with a hummable harmony and an irresistible beat you will inadvertantly find yourself tapping your feet to. "Cocobelle" is sort of like this except that its faux orchestration majestically elevates it to become the standout. Crashing cymbals and Frick's swamped vocals only add to the effect and it winds up sounding not unlike The Russian Futurists. The difference is that Moonbabies have the better musical arsenal: Both Frick and Johansson trade vocal duties and both are multi-instrumentalists, so there's never a lack of things going on.

Another example of this and of that expanding sound we were talking about eariler is "Ratatouille," an acoustic interlude that sets up the quintessential Moonbabies track in just four minutes, "Walking on My Feet." Just a touch of tremolo to those guitars adds that My Bloody Valentine nod you thought they'd forgotten. I picked "The 9th" because I thought it was a quirky track, its guitars scratching alongside the burbling synths and then bursting free to reveal an Owen-like beauty in its verses. Though it's nothing like the epic grandeur of "Weekend a Go-Go" or the strummed simplicity of "Ratatouille" on the face of it, the combination of both the epic and the overlooked is part of what makes this song (and this band) so good.

As you can probably tell, Audiversity is not really an indie-pop hub... But we review what we like because we think it's good, and Moonbabies is a band I always wish the best for. It may not necessarily sound like your bag, and to a certain extent I don't want to sound like I know anything here... But they made a believer out of me, and I didn't give a fuck about SMiLE.