(Oakland-based The Luna Sequence brought us a new album in September, and today DGR brings us his extensive reactions to the new music.)
Those who’ve walked many miles with our site will know that there are a few things we love to do around here. We like some good off the wall cover art that’ll blind people, we love us some patterns and numbers to nerd out on, and we love making the joke about getting around the ‘no clean singing’ rule – because when have we ever broken that before? – by reviewing music that has no singing at all.
Then you get into the more personal enjoyment that specific authors gain a rise out of, and in this case, yours truly absolutely enjoys throwing electronics and industrial projects on the main page, just knowing that it is going to be completely different from the wall-to-wall brutality/banshee-shrieking we enjoy posting on a day-to-day basis.
Luckily, musician Kaia Young has proven to be a bastion and has been able to provide on more than one occasion the opportunity to knock out two birds with one stone, and do both the ‘no clean singing’ joke and the electronics side of thing with their The Luna Sequence project.
We’ve actually covered The Luna Sequence before and I’ve personally included them quite a few times across year-end lists and such, because I am an unabashed sucker for music that sounds like it would be the perfect soundtrack for running around in one of the cities in a Mirror’s Edge game.
Having been most recently kept busy by the Invocation Array project – three albums and a smattering of singles will do such – it was surprising to see that there was in fact a seven year gap since the time of 2016’s Darkness Leaves Us No Where To Go. You wouldn’t be able to tell with The Luna Sequence‘s newest album I Only Remember Falling because this is an album that returns the project to right where it left off and ensconces itself in doing exactly what it was known to do before: hybridizing electronica and rock, getting severely heavy at times, and using a whole bevy of other instruments basically acting as vocal lines to make songs that flicker between genres and into and out of heavy moments often enough to keep things exciting.
You don’t need to be able to see through time to guess that The Luna Sequence isn’t the heaviest thing you’re going to come across. All the qualifiers and descriptors early on will tip you off to that. That doesn’t mean we’re in a world comprised entirely of the crytallines and rays of light bouncing on every surface, creating a qualia of color that would be impossible to describe.
The Luna Sequence occupies a mid range between the two in its own, specially marked world that has ranged from moody and somber to the outright aggressive. Much of it is pushed forward by hard-driving guitar and, yes, a wall of drum machine that attacks with the ferocity of someone crazed. I Only Remember Falling gets about as punchy as its now-seven-year-old sibling at times, with double-bass rolls that kick in and could drive through the wall of the building behind them, yet it isn’t quite as bleak and hefty as its predecessor either.
I Only Remember Falling splits the difference across The Luna Sequence catalog, surprisingly enough, and finds a median that rests somewhere between all of the project’s releases. You don’t immediately have the one descriptor that could’ve been prescribed to previous albums available to you – this project has gone through some heavy, heavy phases – and instead I Only Remember Falling counterbalances much of the overwhelmingly aggressive with moments of punk, proper electronica melodies that seem to ascend and descend like a bird weaving through the skies, and melodies that are often occupied anywhere from a much reliable violin and bells combo, to even something verging on synthed-out cello. I Only Remember Falling sticks to a high tempo for much of it and plays out like an artist returning to a project and rediscovering all of the tools that were available to them and they loved to use.
“There, At The Roots” is one of the prime examples of this, sounding like a combination of every artistic strain that has brushed up against The Luna Sequence being condensed into a four-minute song. Quick-moving and aggressive, yet still filled with a lot of familiar instrumentation that has been used throughout The Luna Sequence throughout the years.
“The Opposite Shore” before it does five minutes of heavy lifting and laying of groundwork for the album, but it’s also partially there as it breeds atmospheres of familiarity. The album as a whole still retains the sort of quietly depressed world that had been fashioned by previous releases, but with its opening two songs I Only Remember Falling still makes a statement of wanting to be as fast as its older sibling. Thus, the cruchier guitars that appear throughout songs or the massive guitar leads – like the one “There, At The Roots” wraps itself around – don’t seem out of place.
It is an album of a lot of worlds crashing together at once. Things are neatly kept at about four and a half minutes for nearly every song – give or take, a few soar higher and others undercut them just as quickly – so the nine auditory journeys all maintain a similar scope and wrap up at about the same pacing. “Drifting, Converging” for instance, calls back to early Luna Sequence years by focusing more on its otherworldly instrumentation and aforementioned crystal-glass worlds, and “From Many Fires” seems to want to keep walking that path right afterward until about a minute and a half in when the wall of guitar comes bursting through the door.
It’s fun enough that it keeps happening throughout I Only Remember Falling without allowing the album to drift into becoming a background soundtrack. There’s always enough there in each song that you notice when the mood shifts and things get spicier for a few minutes.
Its tempting to describe I Only Remember Falling as a ‘return’ sort of album but the hidden subtext of that is always the continuation of the sentence wherein it becomes ‘return to form’. It’s not that The Luna Sequence, for all our talk of different explorations in each song, hasn’t been surprisingly consistent in its overall sound since its foundation. Techniques, gear, and sound may have improved but barring directional shifts, the throughline of The Luna Sequence has remained about the same every time. The sort of sound that is fantastic to throw on for a whole discography and let your chosen music player mix up. You get whip-sawed through all eras, the really heavy ones, the more cyber-futuristic leaning ones, and the full-on ‘person wielding guitar like a weapon amidst a rave’ ones.
There isn’t really anything odd between them, so the ‘to form’ part of the equation gets thrown from a moving train pretty early on. Instead, I Only Remember Falling is a return of the project as a whole, and you get the sense that some of these songs have been gestating for some time. You never actually know what may have happened to a particular project behind the scenes – and the results might be just as boring as they might be spectacular were you to learn them – and instead you only have the ‘here and now’ of a project at that moment.
I Only Remember Falling sounds like The Luna Sequence being lifted out of stasis and instead of going for a few days of trying to reorient itself to the world as it is now, just picks up right where it left off and re-learns what it is along the way. The accidental career-retrospective element of it is fun, and it is good to see that the darker atmospherics and somber reflections that the project often casts still remain firmly in place.
https://thelunasequence.bandcamp.com/album/i-only-remember-falling
http://www.thelunasequence.com/
http://www.facebook.com/thelunasequence