Ian Moore - Luminaria

Genre pop Publisher Yep Roc External Links Yep Roc

Ian Moore has been compared to Jeff Buckley and Nick Drake. Actually, he sings a lot like Skip Spence, the former Moby Grape singer and songwriter who rode his motorcycle down to Nashville one day in 1968 and made the Oar album, which is certainly a forerunner of all the post-rock weirdo folk-country efforts that we've seen in the last decade or so. In fact, Luminaria even sounds almost as spooky as Spence's album--everything's played for atmosphere, there are echoes of classic '60s pop, and the whole thing is sort of like postmodern Chris Isaak, maybe. A lot spookier and without the rockabilly overtones. This is more like a late version of pop--Moore does a song about Sir Robert Scott that wouldn't be out of place on a Bee Gees album like Odessa. And certainly one can trace the lineage of this set of songs from Spence through Big Star's Third and on to Wilco and Buckley--although no one's ever going to make anything quite like the third Big Star album.

So this is one to appreciate for texture--lots of acoustic guitar and reverb, sweetened with the occasional trumpet or cello. It's perfect for dreaming about a trip out west to Colorado through Kansas's expanse. Or a drive through the emptiness of west Texas. Some of it is Lennonesque; there are, as I say, echoes of all sorts of '60s and '70s pop music here. Lyrically, he has his moments: "I get hazy and lazy/Can't get from my bed" is a representative example. Melodically he's not terribly accomplished, and harmonically he relies on a few rather obvious tricks. "Caroline" does evoke the Beach Boys at their most distanced and troubled. The textures do eventually kick in, given how basically samey the album sounds.

In fact, I'll take the Skip Spence conceit a step further--Moore recorded his first record at what he calls "this really fancy studio in Nashville." Spence recorded there, for Columbia, and totally subverted the recording process by overdubbing all the parts himself, creating crazy lurching patterns that must have had the engineers down there completely baffled. And Spence, unlike Moore, seems to have been truly nuts, and after making Oar never made another solo album (although he apparently did rejoin Moby Grape briefly around 1971, for their country-inflected 20 Granite Creek album). Moore is nowhere as eccentric as Spence, but you get the same sense of all-American loneliness from him you as you do from Spence. The road, lack of success, stardom, and the wide, wide space of America do funny things to people. Luminaria is a worthy entry into the list of works that explore space, both psychic and physical.