CREDIT: MOON DUO
The singers must have gotten schooled in the Rocky School of Linguistics because you can't understand a word they sing.

The band Moon Duo is actually a trio of musicians all hailing from San Francisco, California. The band just released its latest album, Shadow of the Sun, on March 3 and has started out on a tour across North America.

This psychedelic krautrock band combines crunchy guitars, overdriven synthesizers, acoustic drums and reverb-laden vocals to create a type of trance music you won’t ever hear in a dance club.

Perhaps if I were on psychedelics while listening to this album, it would have been a different experience, but from a purely sonic standpoint, this album leaves a lot to be desired.

I’m not going to beat around the bush: Shadow of the Sun is one of the worst and most repetitive albums of 2015. Although krautrock is generally based around minimal chord progressions, the riffs in Shadow of the Sun are only two or three chords long – it’s almost micro-krautrock.

These riffs aren’t the backing progressions for a more complex overlay of instruments either. These chords take centre stage and persist through the entirety of each song, only to be broken up by the occasional psychedelic guitar solo. This album brings the term trance music to a terrifying new level of distaste.

Shadow of the Sun is just one long bad trip, and by the end of the first listen, I was physically nauseous.

The vocal delivery on this album might have been good at one point, until they crammed layer upon layer of reverb overtop, reducing it to nothing more than dissonant sounds that almost resemble voices. The vocals are essentially a write off on every song of this album except the final track, “Cross the Way,” which is a bonus song. It’s not that the singing is bad – the two singers are on key and in sync with each other – you just can’t understand a thing being said.

Aside from the vocals, everything else on the album comes through pretty crisp. The tones of the guitar build a great aggressive atmosphere overtop of synthesizers that almost step into the realm of optimism at some points but are predominantly pretty dark. The acid-induced guitar solos that peak through some of the songs like “Free the Skull” and “Ice” are definitive highlights on this album and make the composition as a whole, almost listenable.

The saving grace in Shadow of the Sun comes with the song “In a Cloud,” which is toned down a couple notches from the rest of the album, as if Moon Duo took a healthy dose of morphine before writing this track. The redundant riff finally takes a back seat, in lieu of a wandering stoner rock guitar solo that supersedes the majority of the song. The guitar itself loses much of its aggressive distortion in this portion and emulates the reverb in the vocals for an overall pleasing song. It’s a shame more of the album isn’t like this, because it was almost long enough to cure the pounding headache from the first half of the record.

The only interesting aspect of this album is the final song “Cross the Way,” which has the only understandable vocals on the whole album. It’s almost enough to distract you from the repetitive synthesizer riff that is played beneath the entire song. When the vocals aren’t distracting you, a face melting guitar solo takes their place so that we remain focused on something beyond the underlying three-chord progression. This song really pulls you in and is refreshing from the rest of the album, but just when you’re starting to enjoy Moon Duo, they cut the track off. Right smack in the middle of the guitar solo. It just stops dead.

Who ends an album like that? Did the budget for the record run out? Did they lose the rest of their audio files? I almost wish I had bought Shadow of the Sun so I could have the satisfaction of taking it out of my CD player and breaking it in half.

This album is repetitive garbage that I’m not sure anything could make it enjoyable.

Rating: 1/2 a star of of 5 stars