This band, a Seattle-based quartet mainly on loan from Fleet Foxes and Crystal Skulls, takes its name from a Canned Heat song that frets rather sweetly about humankind decimating the moon. The song isn't preoccupied with any particular threat, just a general sense that it's a matter of time before we make a real mess out of that place, too. "I hope I see you in the sky/ At night when I get old/ I hope you'll look about the same/ As when I was a boy," Alan Wilson muses in his high, strange warble. It's an oddly affecting tribute to a big dumb gray orb that could probably use a bit of sympathy-- I mean, of all the gravitational pulls of all planets in all the solar systems, it got sucked into ours?
A certain expectation of depth and sensitivity persists for a band naming itself after a song that effectively mines an emotional connection with a piece of rock floating hundreds of thousands of miles outside our personal atmospheres, but Poor Moon's five-song debut EP falls short. Illusion is a slight effort by any standard, even the most fair: the bar set by the prior work of the band members themselves. Brothers Peter and Ian Murray comprise the tweaky, brainy, almost-entirely under-the-radar Seattle-based act the Christmas Cards, who have released one LP, 2009's quietly solid Happy Birthday; multi-instrumentalist Casey Wescott has played in both Fleet Foxes and Crystal Skulls, spinning out woodsy, harmonic folk in one and rehabbing 1970s AM gold in the other, joined in both of those acts by Christian Wargo, Poor Moon's lead singer/guitarist and primary songwriter.
If not for its pedigree, Poor Moon could easily be accused of straight aping Fleet Foxes; despite its pedigree, that suggestion still rings weirdly true. The vocal reverb, the arpeggiated electric guitar, the tumbling acoustic fingerwork, the muffled drums, the gauzy group harmonies: Robin Pecknold and his crew hardly pioneered the combination of these elements, but they've done it better than most anyone since CSNY, so they've got an almost proprietary claim on the sound for now. Curiously, though, Poor Moon struggles despite Wargo and Wescott's direct connection. On Illusion, the four-part harmonies fail to hit that spine-tingling sweet spot and the instrumentation feels muffled and low-energy, rather than deliberately bare-bones or restrained. Lyrically, Pecknold has taken some jabs for his romantic fixation on the rustic and agrarian as antidotes to his millennial malaise, but at least he dealt in specifics, however fey; trying to identify anything concrete in Wargo's lines is almost like pawing around in a smoke-filled room, grasping at nothing a hand could hold.
"I don't know how to prepare to be seen," he sings on the opening track, his harp-like plucking spiderwebbed by faint digital distortion. "Isn't there anyplace you want to go?" he asks on the shuffling "Anyplace," a plume of airy harmonies trailing in his wake. A generous explanation would be that Illusion is a concept EP about the nature of the chimera, that the tracks are meant to capture and embody their non-subjects' non-natures. The solipsistic "People in Her Mind", about a poor cipher of a girl "that no one could recognize/ that no one could identify/ 'cause no one had heard anything/ from anyone who knows anything about her," assists that theory. A jaunty, Hollies-esque thing with a nice Spector drum-bounce, it's the EP's most sonically distinct song, though it could use a real verse or two. (Check with Pecknold first-- he might have a few to spare.) "Once Before", with its splashy drums and slinky, noir vibe, pulls more from the Crystal Skulls side of the family tree. "I curse the day that love walked out my door," Wargo sings, but he doesn't sound heartbroken or bitter or especially like he's cursing anything, actually-- just bored, like even he'd rather be doing something else.
Closing track "Widow" sketches the vague sadness ("all the years she spent/ never knowing where he went") of a woman left at home by a wandering husband ("he was chasing after what he might be sorry if he hadn't done"). The sparse, tender lead-in of "oh's," the contemplative finger-plucked guitar, the imagery of earth and furniture and death-- did Fleet Foxes' "Oliver James" not already go there, and more elegantly, and quite recently? Why does Wargo, an established music-maker in his own right (he played with Danielson Famile and Pedro the Lion before joining up with Fleet Foxes), seem so determined to abide by the template set by the band that his new act is supposed to function as a side-project of? Can he just not get enough? Or does he find the Pecknold-led amalgam of these same influences, tones and affects to be somehow too urgent, too muscular? Will some eventual Poor Moon full-length do a better job of making good on the band's considerable promise? Or am I the misguided one here, complaining about the presence of 15 more minutes of passably lovely music in the world? When should you be happy with what you have, and when should you demand more? In a way, that's the same question "Widow" asks, and answers: The woman takes care of her wandering man, poisoning his drink when he finally returns home-- a curious safeguard against future loneliness-- and then the whole thing shimmers away into nothingness.
