With the mild picking of a colorful electric guitar and the slow plodding of some distant percussion to serve as the canvas, the darkly-melodic voice behind Moon Fever ushers us into their new single “Shaking Off The Evil” and immediately clues us in to just how menacing an affair we’re about to partake in. There’s nothing overbearing about the instrumentation in this introduction per say, but to suggest that the feeling is anything but suffocating as we get into the guts of the harmony here would be an outright lie. We’re in the midst of a brutish show of strength from Moon Fever, and in the next four minutes, they’re going to show us just how much power they can exert regardless of the venue they’re in.
SMART URL: https://lnk.to/ShakingOffTheEvil
The vocal is the undisputed star of the show here, but it doesn’t take away from the essence of the instrumental charisma at all – it adds to the substance of the melodicism in “Shaking Off The Evil” exponentially. As soon as our singer’s voice and the guitars make contact for the first time in the mix, they become inseparable components of the same harmony, and together their potency will be what gives the hook in this song its added zeal. This isn’t to say that the structure of the arrangement is missing the pizazz that a lot of classic rock bands would have given it so much as it’s to acknowledge what makes this single and its music video so hard to put down once picked up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuFMrSk9AJ8
In most of the contemporary indie rock that I listen to, the production becomes as much an instrument as a guitar or a drumbeat would, but that’s not the case with “Shaking Off The Evil” for even a fleeting moment. With the melodies being as certifiably organic as they are from verse to verse, there isn’t any room in the final product for the band to lean on the sound board with regards to putting fireworks in the right spots. They’re depending on the natural depth of their tonality to make a big impression on the listeners with this release, and even in the imagistic music video for the song, there are no moments in which the visuals beat out the background beats for our attention.
APPLE MUSIC: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/moon-fever/1497455620?ign-gact=3&ls=1
I had never heard of Moon Fever before a colleague in the music industry got me into their new single, but if this is any sort of indication as to what I should be expecting out of their work from here on out, they’re going to become a staple of my watch-list in 2020. There aren’t a lot of reasons to believe that rock music isn’t dead outside of its storied underground – particularly on the American side of the Atlantic – but if you have faith in this genre making any sort of a credible comeback in the next ten years, bands like the puritanical Moon Fever are who you need to be supporting. Theirs is a noble cause, and it’s produced some amazing new harmonies in this latest single.
Troy Johnston