New Luna – New Luna (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

New Luna plays a very clever hand, whether they are aware of it or not, but they are surely aware that it is not an easy task to deliver music that is at once both new and interesting and still have mass appeal. For whilst their core sound sits along a cultural line that links the intricacies of indie music with the more aggressive and experimental urges that make up the alt-rock camp, even that is not enough to stand out these days, so what is a band to do? Well, in the case of New Luna what you do is look back to the trappings of the shoegaze era and explore those same dynamic interplays, examine the 90’s college rock loud-quiet templates and wander dream-pop landscapes and soak up those lessons in the use of light and shade.

Whether by osmosis or a more conscious effort, all of these elements are used to colour what can otherwise be an all to familiar guitar band style, I mean a 4-piece, white boy, guitar band coming out of Manchester’s cold and gritty redbrick streets is hardly a new story. But across these four songs they manage to breath new life into the format, offering delicate spatial awareness alongside overdriven guitar workouts, mixing jangling and hypnotic riff-a-rama with muscular guitar passages, soaring crescendos with emotive minimalism.

Re-invention is always the answer and even if New Luna can’t claim to have re-invented the wheel, they have certainly re-treaded it, painted it interesting colours and added some shimmering gloss. And it is this balancing act that will find that they appeal not only to the arty set who will revel in the creativeness but also the mainstream who are just happy to sit in the back seat whilst you take them for a spin around the block.