Our Moon Is Full [VINYL]

Anyone who has seen the movie "The Thin Red Line" where we are privy to the internalised thoughts if various American second world war soldiers as they contemplate their conflict against the Japanese will get a sense of that movie as they listen to Our Moon Is Full. Much of the album sounds like inner monologue as various guest artists add a range of rambling poetic and musical nuances. It lends the album a loose incoherent feel at times but when it gels like on the magnificent jazz inflected "Cleanliness Is next To Godliness", where Oxbow front man Eugene Robinson purrs smokily ,then with incremental desperation over it's entire nine minute length this album achieves a meditative and investigational sense that is both compelling and impressive.
Strings Of Consciousness is a coactive band featuring various artists who lets say are on the side of the fence marked difficult and experimental when it comes to music. The music is stylistically schizophrenic incorporating jazz, rock, chamber music and several others probably into a heady sonic brew ruminating on life, death , decay , conflict and amity , though I'm probably simplifying that considerably. This approach doesn't always work -"In Between " -mumbled by Enablers Pete Simonelli is wreathed in a misty garland of instrumentation that is too amorphous and negligible though it does pick up toward the end. Similarly "While The Sun Burns Out Another Sun " read languorously by Black Sifichi spends three quarters of its over nine minute length hazily dribbling out of the speakers though again it does stretch out its sonic muscles for the last third.
But "Sonic Glimpses" (which incidentally would have been the perfect title for the album ) featuring Barry Adamson even flexes some melodic sinews while "Crystallize It" with fervent vocals by Girls Against Boys Scott McCloud is dramatic and engaging . J. G. Thirwell is unexpectedly low key on "Asphodel ", the vocals sounding like Rotary Connection re-born as clanking cyborgs ."Defrost Oven" is a genuinely pretty instrumental interlude" while the closing "Midnight Moonbeams is a dead of night soliloquy with Black Sifichi again over out of kilter keyboards and waxing /waning guitar /brass.
Our Moon Is Full is not an easy album to come to terms with but it was never meant to be. It requires patience , concentration and commitment from the listener and as such it will only appeal to a niche audience as most of us want our thrills and moments of glistening joy far more easily than this music gives it up. I thinks it s worth that effort but then I paid out good money for it and I long ago learnt never to dismiss an album on the first listen.

I have sat with this record for a week in order to fully digest it, as on initial impression whilst I knew I loved it immediately, I didn't feel it was fair to review the release as it has so many layers! Featuring an incredible list of contributors, the album shifts in style from jazzy post-rock to soundtrack western through to proto industrial and lounge noir. Sounds heavy going, but this album is very coherent and doesn't take you on a wild goose chase - it is laid out like a perfect movie, taking you from one surprising scene to another, but with a clear context.

Impossible as it may seem - Our Moon Is Full is actually greater than the sum of it's parts! (parts being Foetus, Scott from Girls Against Boys, Hugh Hopper from Soft Machine, Andy Diagram, label boss Barry Adamson, Eugene from Oxbow and Pete Simonelli from the Enablers... all very talented musicians (check them all out if the budget allows)!

Sonically, for a quick condense, it reminded me of Tortoise, Talk Talk, Do Make Say Think, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Current 93, Badalamenti and Morricone. At once. That good.