My mom has always loved “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, so recently I decided to test her NIN fandom and put on a CD of one of my old college radio shows that began with “Mr. Self-Destruct”. My mom, appalled, said, “This is not music. If you can’t sing along with it, it’s not music.”
Damon Moon And The Whispering Drifters would not be my mother’s cup of tea, was my first thought when I heard the opening track from the “The Holy Noise” EP, titled “Further On”. But, hell – and not an act out of pure childish rebellion – I love them. The group is absolutely nothing like Trent Reznor‘s industrial heaven, yet arguably Reznor & Co. may have more radio-friendly singles than them. Throughout listening to their EP, there were many times I thought I was about to be taken into Swans post-punk territory, hauntingly drifting in and out of each other (“Restless Roads End”), but then the songs give in to their intrinsic folk structure, with just a hint of their southern Georgian roots.
Guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Damon Moon has been the anchor in a group that has seen many members come through (their Facebook lists ten!) over the last three years, but today Jacob Smith (lap steel guitar), Chris Cooke (guitar), Adam Laidlaw (bass) and Jonathan Sanders (drums) join Moon in the band hailing from Atlanta. Their latest single “Seasonal Suite No. 62″ from the upcoming and second full-length release “Lungs, Dirt And Dreams” embraces a more classical song structure. My immediate impression of Moon remains that these songs are dwellers in a that post-rocky apocalypse, but the archetypical song structure is pushed to the forefront.
The way we encounter such a onslaught of songs these days, it’s sometimes easy to forget that someone put their time into that, they made it, that piece was something that satisfied something in them and they wanted others to hear it. I like everything about this single, especially the title because it draws attention back to that idea of crafting a song. It’s an epochal, Homer-esque journey of sound, complete with lyrics, so you have a more loosely defined map of where you’re being taken. Whereas before the dark instrumental shifts allowed you to take yourself to a place, The Whispering Drifters have now roughly defined that space into something a little more eerie, woodsy and tastefully Americana; a little bit knowing but still treacherously withholding, and this takes you to a place. I feel like Little Red Riding Hood.
“Lungs, Dirt and Dreams” will be released on February 21st, but you can download the first single below. You can stream their awesome “The Holy Noise” EP in full on their website.
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Damon Moon and The Whispering Drifters – “Seasonal Suite No. 62″
