Anybody else here heard this band?
They played SeaProg last weekend, and its members have played the same festival before as members of other bands. Their music is unabashedly Seventies-oriented stuff, and in some ways, sounds like various US second-wave prog from '74 or so - Cathedral, Starcastle, Mirthrandir, and the like. But not exactly: When it came to the actual songs inside their proggy elaborations, many second-wave bands of the time fell back on meat-and-potatoes Midwest hard rock or imitation Beatles. Moon Letters don't, though; the pop songs inside their minor epics and extended suites sound more like pop songs of the Seventies, more like Elton John or Wings or the Moody Blues than REO Speedwagon. This gets an odd effect - it sounds like classic-era prog, yet you can't really point to anybody it sounds like because the combination is different.* It's really decent and well-crafted music, within the limitation of sounding like a lot of other music, and they play it well.
Their presentation is also very 1974 - the keyboardist wears a cape (which probably started out as a tablecloth), the lead guitarist dresses like a metalhead of the period, and the singer wears a costume and face paint. He also performs theatrics, which involved waving a wooden prop sword about (and eventually getting knighted with it), wearing a black robe and pounding on a floor-tom set up in the aisle with a creepy blue spotlight shining through the drumhead onto his face, and other stuff. It was exactly the sort of thing you might have seen in 1974 (done by some local prog band whose name is lost in the mists of time, and who have long since gone on to be accountants and auto mechanics), and they do it absolutely deadpan.
Anyway, I think they should play more festivals than just this one. They might not fit into every line-up, but the ROSFest crowd could really enjoy a relatively young act who so wholeheartedly hearken back to the old days. And there are probably other festivals that they'd go over well at, too.
Here's their album: https://moonletters.bandcamp.com/
Haven't been able to find any live videos, though.
- JH
*(The prog bands of the period tended to ignore the pop bands - pop music, after all, was what they were trying to go beyond. The reverse, though was not true - many pop bands would have one or two proggy tracks per album because people liked that stuff on an album, and because it let the band blow off steam and be creative. So if you could imagine a band whose material was reminiscent of Elton John's "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding, or Wings' "Live and let Die", or Sweet's "Love is like Oxygen", you might have some kind of box Moon Letters would fit in.)
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Originally Posted by Splicer
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