Moon Duo should not be afraid of taking risks. This is, after all, a side project of space-rock four-piece Wooden Shjips, they of the superfluous letter J. Moon Duo has no particular expectations to live up to, an audience who prefers the outlandish to the conventional, and enough hair between its members to earn them honorary memberships to ZZ Top.
And yet new album Shadow of the Sun, released Marsh 3 via Sacred Bones, always seems to be holding back. Despite what lead single “Animal” would have you believe, nothing on Shadow, their fourth LP, pushes any major boundaries, either for the band itself or for its genre of gritty, slightly industrial psychedelia.
It’s not that krautrock and psych can’t coexist—just look at TOY and its side projects, for example—it’s more that Moon Duo fails to balance its darker tendencies with a compelling reason for listeners to stick around. Successful psych bands turn repetition into transcendence; Shadow, by contrast, ranges from innocuous to mildly interesting.
What makes Shadow particularly disappointing is that it seems to have had the potential to be so much more. Founding members Erik Ripley and Sanae Yamada are skilled and capable musicians, and for this album even brought on drummer John Jeffrey, apparently in an attempt to liven up their stock sound. Unfortunately, though, Jeffrey doesn’t seem particularly adept at sounding distinct from the drum fills that dotted Moon Duo’s last three releases.
There’s nothing wrong, really, with Shadow of the Sun: its problem is all the things that aren’t right with it. For all of the dreamy guitar lines and half-buried vocals, the album simply fails to soar. Instead, like so many middling releases before it, it bumps along mindlessly, the sharp vitriol behind “Animal” a pleasant anomaly to close out the affair. Shadow lives comfortably in the background, an adequate soundtrack for a pensive day but nothing interesting enough to pay close attention to.