Jack Name has a flair for the dramatic. Here's the establishing shot that opens Weird Moons: "Activated midnight, actuate the beast/ Cast your spell on the bastard child blasting Judas Priest." The stage is set for a concept album featuring werewolves, one of Jupiter's moons, skulking synthesizers, specters, and watchers. In the tradition that began with last year's Light Show, Name hasn't arbitrarily packaged some hodgepodge collection of weird songs—he's delivering a handful of tableaux to form a story arc within the same universe.
This isn't new territory for the man, whose recorded vocals often seem to be filtered through the guise of a character. On Light Show, he altered his voice to play both protagonist and antagonist in a battle between darkness and light, like a 9-year-old acting out both parts while narrating the war between his Cyclops and Magneto action figures. Name makes allegorical music, symbolic of the darkness that lives in the real world. When he was finished recording his debut album, he was diagnosed with cancer. "I had had it for five years without even knowing," he said. The werewolves and shape-shifters on Weird Moons were inspired by what his body went through during treatment. "I can’t stand still, my body is changing, and I feel like I’m all alone," he sings on "Lowly Ants". "Sometimes I waste my mind, I feel like I’m already dying."
Steeped in darkness, Name has carved out his best album yet. Some of Light Show's more vibrant and maximal tracks ("Do the Shadow") couldn't stand up to the more spacious songs, the ones that had room for him to linger on a verse for a bit ("Pure Terror"). On Weird Moons, he lets himself tease out grooves for a bit longer, and the extra space puts a better spotlight on just how good this guy is at writing hooks. "Under the Weird Moon" packs rafter-reaching glam pop while the brooding synths of "Running After Ganymede" pulse in the darkness, occasionally mimicking a wolf's howl. He's soulfully ethereal like Station to Station or Low-era Bowie ("Something About Glenn Goins"), and he's crunchy and industrial ("Watcher Talk"). If his voice isn't muffled beneath other instrumentals, it's almost unsettlingly present, like when he coolly asserts "I like to feel my body changing form" at the front of the "Waiting for Another Moon" mix.
In order to enjoy Light Show, it felt necessary to be invested in the album's story. A lot of the songs were essentially character-establishing scenes in a film, and even though the music was interesting, some songs felt like vehicles for the plot. While there's obviously an arc here, all eight of these songs work when removed from the album's context. His ambition as a songwriter has earned him a spot in the Hall of Pop Eccentrics alongside Ariel Pink (P**om Pom featured Name) and Connan Mockasin, but when you step back from the monsters and implicit darkness, you realize that Jack Name is also very good at writing earworms.
