Poor Moon carries much more weight than your typical indie rock debut. A "supergroup" only in the most local sense, this Pacific Northwest quartet represents a who's who of acts regional and national: Singer/guitarist/primary songwriter Christian Wargo has played with Pedro the Lion and Danielson Famile, Casey Wescott with Crystal Skulls, and Ian Murray and Peter Murray with Seattle un-Googleables the Christmas Cards. But let's not bury the lede: The closest and weightiest association is with Fleet Foxes, which claims both Wargo and Wescott as prominent members.
It's inevitable that Poor Moon will be compared to Fleet Foxes, which would be a daunting prospect for any band but especially for an offshoot. Their aesthetics and approaches are strikingly similar, right down to the gentle reverb and some of the record-collection touchstones: Crosby Stills & Nash, Judee Sill, Buffy Sainte-Marie, to name a few. Every song on Poor Moon turns on some sonic flourish or instrumental shift that occasionally comes across as showy but more often than not works well to give each song a distinctive identity, whether it's the chimes and celeste on "Bucky Pony" or the whistled birdsong of the too-precious opener "Clouds Below". There are certainly moments that sound suspiciously familiar, like the reverb-swaddled vocals on "Holiday" or the soft crash of drums and guitar on "Same Way". Poor Moon either shows how closely Wargo and Wescott hew to the Fleet Foxes approach or demonstrates how essential they are to that band's celebrated sound.
As a songwriter, Wargo, however, lacks the specificity of Robin Pecknold's outdoorsy self-reckoning, which has lent Fleet Foxes' history-mining efforts a strong sense of purpose and poignancy. By contrast, Poor Moon sound gauzier of mission, as though re-creating certain pop-historical sounds was their endgame. Lyrically, Wargo tends to get bogged down in barely told stories and overarching concepts, like the overly familiar afterlife of "Heaven's Door". Musically it sounds like they're snoozing the Strawberry Alarm Clock, but strangely there's no heft to the idea of paying "for the sins that I love too much." At least he sneaks in an offhand Grateful Dead reference when he admits, "Got the friend of the devil living in my soul."
Wargo's lyrics are fine but largely ignorable, which may have less to do with the words themselves than with how they are delivered. He sounds like an adenoidal Art Garfunkel, his voice high and clear and precise. That's not a slam or anything; Garfunkel was, by nearly everybody's estimation, a better singer than Simon. But there's not a lot of emotional range there, no strain to accentuate a thought or a feeling, just a drowsy introspection that runs the length of the album somewhat monotonously. In other words, it's hard to view Poor Moon as anything but a side project-- not worthless, but dramatically overshadowed. Lord knows there are tons of similar enterprises in rock history, some crummy (Tin Machine, SuperHeavy) and some rivaling their members' main outlets (the Postal Service, the Dead Weather). At the moment, Poor Moon lies somewhere in between those two poles.
But there is promise here: This full-length reveals a unit much surer of purpose than we heard on Illusion, the free EP the band released earlier this year. These songs are gutsier in their arrangements, more surefooted in the songwriting, and more certain of the band's identity. "Waiting For" may be the band's boldest and most heraldic chorus, at once assertive and-- thanks to Wargo's delicate vocals-- retreating. At times there is an intriguing disconnect between the tone of the lyrics and the tone of the arrangements, and that dissonance can be jarring, even invigorating: "I couldn't keep it silent, I didn't know that sadness could be so violent," Wargo sings on "Pulling Me Down", but neither the music nor the melody sounds sad or violent. Rather than coming off as gutless, that contrast bends the tune's exclamation point into a disquieting question mark.
Poor Moon ends quietly with "Birds", whose harmonies and chord progressions recall Foxes but whose momentum flutters off into the air. It's a rather abrupt and unceremonious conclusion that does little to suggest a shape or story in the album. Poor Moon turns out to be a wisp of a record, intentionally light and certainly promising but also oddly-- and perhaps ironically-- weightless.
