Moon Duo makes rock’n’roll comfort food. Since they debuted in 2009, their sound has progressively gotten smoother and more sugary. Ripley Johnson melts his singing into the music, rarely breaking character with yelps or screams, while his guitar stays mellifluous even as its fuzz gets denser. Sanae Yamada’s keyboard melodies lilt snugly, while simple beats—once executed with a drum machine, now handled by John Jeffrey—swing like a hammock. If you have a taste for German motorik drive, Velvet Underground chug, Spacemen 3 hypnotism, and blissful psych-rock, Moon Duo hit an irresistible sweet spot.
Occult Architecture Vol. 2, their fifth full-length, is their sweetest spot so far. It’s intended as a brighter counterpart to the darker Vol. 1 released in February, and while the two albums aren’t radically divergent, Vol. 2 is definitely the lightest, breeziest Moon Duo record to date. Everything flows ahead at mid tempo, with no tangential digressions or disruptive curveballs. Nearly half the album is taken up by two instrumentals that suggest the band jamming on a sunny, worry-free afternoon. It’d be easy to say music this pleasant is also fleeting, but just because Moon Duo indulge a sweet tooth doesn’t mean Vol. 2 is weightless. Think of them as sonic pastry chefs: you can’t live off their songs alone, but they’re not all empty calories either.
That combination of sweetness and substance is crystallized by “Lost in Light,” an eight-and-a-half minute tune so blissed-out and pillowy, it’s like soft-core shoegaze. Over a melody that hints at Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle”—and Spacemen 3’s ode to same—Moon Duo slowly climb toward the clouds, settling into a chorus so dreamy it’s like they’re swimming in cotton candy. As Johnson’s words (again evoking Spacemen 3) mix religious tones with drug references—“What a feeling to be saved,” “I’m a servant to the wind,” “Roll another, you want it”—“Lost in Light” sounds like a stab at rapture via lysergic guitar chords.
The rest of Vol. 2 isn’t quite that euphoric, but enchantment persists. On the two other songs in which Johnson sings, he spools out more paeans to easy drift. “It’s sweet, that Southern roll,” he purrs on see-sawing opener “New Dawn,” while waxing beatific on “Sevens”: “Walk on, the river said...We’re out on the boulevard/Lost in a feeling on the run.” Such serene sentiments aren’t verbalized on instrumental “Mirror’s Edge,” but the tune’s swaying jangle is so laid-back that it begs you to recline your seat and let the music guide you down its own desert highway.
Continuing to chase a sound this sweet and floaty might not be Moon Duo’s best option moving forward. Though they’re nowhere near saccharine on Vol. 2, it’s not hard to imagine them drifting into tooth decay territory if they maintain this path. As Vol. 1 showed, this group is still capable of the kind of darker edges that they’ll surely revisit in the future—all they really need to do is let Yamada work in some descending keyboard chords and things suddenly get a lot spookier. But as an exercise in baking their sound into a decadent dessert, Vol. 2 is pretty convincing—and, more importantly, totally satisfying.
