(2020) Moon Attendant - One Last Summer


Review:
One Last Summer might be Moon Attendant‘s debut album, but the players involved (Nick Holton, Neil Halstead, Ian McCutcheon, Paul Blewett) have spent years collaborating in one way or another on a variety of projects dating all the way back to the ’90s with Slowdive. More recently, they worked together in Black Hearted Brother and HOO, forming a sort of loose collective that has each member getting a turn in the spotlight. Here the songs and voice out front belong to Paul Blewett, and he makes the most of his chance. Like many of the bands mentioned above, Moon Attendant deals in fuzzily psychedelic pop that ropes in elements of dream pop, shoegaze, vintage indie pop, and laid-back mid-’60s L.A. vibes and builds arrangements out of overloaded guitars, burbling synths, and enough reverb to fill a small auditorium. While much of One Last Summer is very much of a piece with the music made by the other members of the group — the bouncing “RHS” could be a track from a Neil Halstead solo album, the rambling low-key country-rocker sounds like it would fit on a record by McCutcheon’s group Loose Salute — Blewett’s writing owes a debt to the mid-’80s school of bands like Felt or Cleaners from Venus that couched their snappy melodies in weirdness and unexpected detours. He exhibits an experimental approach to writing and recording that makes it hard to predict what might happen from one song to the next. Tracks might unspool into extended guitar solos (“Hot Power”), feature bumptious barrelhouse piano that drives an oddly warped arrangement (“Hammers”), pile on space age synths (“Castles Burning”), or be bathed in radiant organs and starstruck vocals (“I Would Like to Teach You”). The twists are plentiful and the songs are all the more memorable for the effort and imagination put into their production and execution. Blewett may not quite be in the company of his ’80s influences — yet — but the inspired and inspiring guitar pop found on One Last Summer certainly proves he’s the unsung hero of this little collective and should get another chance to step out in front as soon as possible.





Tracklist:
01 - Blue
02 - Hot Power
03 - R.H.S
04 - Catch a Train
05 - Hammers
06 - Castles Burning
07 - Sleepy Sleep
08 - Lucky Escape
09 - I Would Like to Teach You
10 - Don't Step Back


Media Report:
Genre: indie-pop, psychedelic rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits