Bad Moon - The Real Sound of Mooching
Colchester three-piece Bad Moon’s drummer, Nicholas Spall, died shortly after recording these tracks. The band took the difficult decision to nonetheless go ahead and self-release ‘The Real Sound of Mooching’, and are to be applauded for doing so under what must be very difficult circumstances.
Putting that to one side, however, the first thing to be said about this EP (apart from “horrible title”) is that the emphasis is definitely on the E(xtended). With four out of the five tracks clocking in at way over six minutes (and the other, ‘Rivers’ just short of the six minute mark), this could definitely have benefitted from some stricter editing along the way.
Vocalist Christian Starkey is clearly aiming, stylistically, for Eddie Vedder (the accompanying press release lists Pearl Jam as one of their influences), and his voice is both gravelly and strident, but this often ends up sounding closer, regrettably, to Chad Kroeger (that’s Mr Nickleback to the fortunate uninitiated among you).
Despite having followed the CD cover’s pretty charmless exhortation, “play me you fucker", and listened to this many times now, it seems that next to nothing, lyrically, has stood out sufficiently for me to now recall. Fine: not every band is, or even should be gifted with a way with words, but couple this with the overworked, fairly turgid, overlong and frankly a little dull musical settings, and this leaves me struggling to complete the requisite word-count for my review. I think the main difficulty here is that there is too little to distinguish one track from another, with opener ‘3’ being the strongest, and therefore everything after that being incrementally less interesting that what preceded it.
The musicianship is workmanlike for the most part, bar a bit of slightly clumsy bass, in places, and overall it is hard to hear much of a trace of their named influences (their press release describes the band as being “For Fans Of”…) Neil Young, The Doors, U2 (perhaps a certain shared pomposity and grandiloquence?) and Bill Hicks (definitely no indications of Hicks’ mordant wit).
Arguably the inclusion of a bit of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s southern-fried attitude (I’m presuming here that ‘Bad Moon Rising’ is the source of the band’s name, and therefore another ostensible influence), certainly a sharper, tighter, shorter set of songs, and possibly also a bit more variety of pace, mood and tone would have produced something more satisfying to the casual listener. As it is, I’m afraid it is difficult to find much here to recommend.