In September 2016, there was the zeitgeist and there was Lo Moon’s debut single “Loveless,” a space about a billion light-years away where sophisti-pop and shoegaze snuck off for seven minutes of heaven. Suspiciously well-produced and promoted, “Loveless” was the only Lo Moon song in existence for nearly a year, during which it attracted the attention of Columbia Records, former Death Cab For Cutie guitarist/producer Chris Walla, festival bookers, and Coachella-core heavyweights MUNA and the Temper Trap. This phenomenon was dutifully documented, most thoroughly by NPR, which has published 20 pieces of Lo Moon content in the past six months. Nearly all would note that their guitarist was the son of Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart. Ah, but plausible deniability for you industry-plant theorists: “Loveless” took nearly five years to evolve from singer Matt Lowell’s original demo to its final released version. Nevertheless, “Loveless” remains a song with a lot riding on it. Without it, there’s no Lo Moon and there’s definitely no Lo Moon, the perilously top-heavy LP it’s expected to carry on its own. If they had a more shitposty sense of humor, they could’ve just called it Loveless.
It’s not like they have any real issue with telegraphing their influences. They’ve covered Prefab Sprout in their live sets, and Lowell has acknowledged that Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis is, “especially vocally, a big influence on me.” This is a massive understatement on two levels, the first of which is that Mark Hollis is the biggest overall influence in every conceivable way on this album’s sound. Most specifically, it lookbooks 1986’s The Colour of Spring, the midpoint between the state-of-the-art pop of early Talk Talk and the timeless, anti-pop spirituals of their later work. Meanwhile, Lowell doesn’t just have almost the exact same vocal timbre as Hollis, both sonorous and strangely clipped like a muted horn, but the same inflections and melodic cadences. Hollis isn’t just the biggest influence on Lowell’s vocals—he might be the only one.
You could do a lot worse than Talk Talk as far as role models, and you can’t do much better. But when a relative unknown attempts and mostly succeeds with emulating a singular, inimitable presence, you end up with the same distracting Uncanny Valley effect that plagued those what’s-his-names that played Biggie and 2Pac in their recent biopics. It’s not quite them, and it becomes difficult to focus on anything else.
That might actually work in the album’s favor. Though Lo Moon can occasionally work in a tingly chorus that hits with the satisfying jolt of a synthesized orchestra hit, nearly all aesthetic decisions are in the interest of signifying vulnerability, intimacy, every part of the lovemaking process that makes lust look crass. The thrill of the chase, ugly-crying over your heartbreak—that’s for pop music. But give any serious scrutiny to Lo Moon and it reveals itself as nearly 50 minutes of relationship vaguebooking, with Lowell scattering scraps of Chris Martin’s notepad over Walla’s downy, high-thread-count covers like rose petals. “We’ll learn to outgrow/The thorns on the rose,” “I know I never had a heart of gold/And now I’m crawling in and out of your skin/I only open doors that I can’t close,” “I used to follow my heart/But now I’m safe in the dark.”
But hey, there’s still “Loveless,” a glittering monolith that towers over Lo Moon and at the very least stands out in the muddled indie-major DMZ just like it did back in 2016. Lo Moon may spend the rest of their existence trying to scale its heights once more, but the very next song throws some unexpected shade on the process: “I sang a song with no words/It sounded absurd/But it brought my numbers up/‘Fair game’/Or whatever works/For better or worse/Who are you to be the judge?” Lowell sings on “The Right Thing,” which could conceivably be a slow-release metaphor for romantic intransigence, or him in character as a former pop mercenary with a guilty conscience (like, say, Mark Hollis).
“My Money” tempts even more far-fetched, non-literal interpretation of very literal lyrics to reconcile the jarring conflict between its sour sentiment and every other aspect of Lo Moon. As these things typically turn out, it’s the song that lingers the longest. “Don’t marry me for my money/I’ve got this love for you honey/It’s baby blue,” Lowell sings on the least relatable chorus of this young year. Whenever it pops into my memory, it’s like a sip from a glass of curdled milk I just can’t help taking to make sure it really is spoiled. If it’s not a failed attempt at a playful jab, à la “Gold Digger,” the only other possibility is that of a character study formulated while watching “The Bachelor.” If Arie Luyendyk Jr. said those exact words, it would sustain schadenfreude Twitter for the rest of 2018. Take the sophistication out of sophisti-pop, and Lo Moon is just another L.A. indie R&B act who tries to bring us a higher love but can’t take things much further beyond bed and bath.
