Open Journal Montreal

Shoot the Moon has a sound that speaks right to something in me. They are like Sonic Youth but less loud, like Arcade Fire with a twist of ska, that makes them a little more laidback, Montreal, easy-going. I need to preface a review of their music by this caveat because the fact of a sound making sense to you is something you just can’t help, and in a way it has little to do with the professionalism or tightness of the band, or of the individual musicians in it.

So though, based on their performance this Friday night at the Main Hall, there’s still ways to grow and all, the first thing I’m putting on the table is that this young Montreal band unhooks something in me and leaves me wanting to drive fast at night on the 401, wailing like a displaced gypsy along with the heartbreaking gutsy holler of Miss Nadia Bashalani.

Dan Schachter’s vocals are like this stuttering, surprising, skinny, witty hipster guy rocking down a windy urban street. His voice is maybe weaker than Nadia’s, but the choices he makes are more interesting. There is a feeling between their voices of strong wills pulling in different directions but not pulling apart- a yearning tension that keeps me wide-eyed when I listen to their songs.

Dan’s voice is almost better for being less hauntingly beautiful and strong- he has to push harder for it, and you appreciate the effort and feel the crackle, the raw edges of his singing, and it draws you in. And he makes your attention worth it with a hint of musical genius that shines through in his uncanny, quiet melodies and unique chord progressions.

There seemed to be a little confusion with the lyrics between Nadia and Dan, and some loss of cohesiveness within the band on what I assume were the newer songs. And there was an incident with the baritone sax knocking over and thereby untuning a guitar. These seven people (sax, drums, guitar, bass, viola, keys, vocals) are definitely still pulling this new “Shoot the Moon” thing together, and sometimes the green-ness shows.

But bear in mind, they are weaving a more complex thing then most of your just-breaking-out bar bands will attempt: they all get up and cross the stage to other instruments between songs. Tara Martin leaves the drums to get behind an ax, and sometimes she stays back there banging and sings instead. James goes from guitar to drums to bass effortlessly, and rocks out creative, funky, shoeless, and passionate strings of sounds wherever he ends up. Nadia speaks, sings, hollers and wails, and then trades places with Louie Nagy, once of Gangster Politics, to sit behind the keys. You have to respect this degree of musicality in band members. The violist and the sax player- Julie Raymond and Mellisa Pipe- stand as anchors in this complex switching. And their sounds serve a similar function: filling out the bewildering, shifting layers of each piece with rich tone and mournful blaring.

Shoot the Moon’s most interesting moments come from this layered motion. Their instrumentation is complex and intense. At one point last night James, on guitar now, built up a kicking rhythm on a jazz guitar that was totally un-hearable, hidden behind a wall of Fender and sax sound; until that dominant piece hit a break, and suddenly you could hear this other jazz rhythm that he had been building in your bones all along.

Bashalani is the heartheartheart at the heart of this band. She plays her voice like it’s an instrument she loves, as though she would close her eyes like that and love the feeling of making those noises with her throat and lungs even if there was no one else around. However, the next challenge for this band’s spreading success rests squarely on her shoulders, and it will require a kind of musical ingenuity that she may need to look to her fellow bandmembers for help with. She needs, I posit, to be pushed outside her melody-making comfort zone by someone with a different kind of relationship to music then she has- a workaholic music genius, or a creative music genius maybe (both of which I think can probably be found within the group). Someone, anyway, who can see a way of building counter melodies that sometimes go against the grain of the instrumentation. Because what’s missing in their sound is the hook- that fascinating change embedded somewhere in a song, that is startling and intriguing, and that makes you want to own the record so you can listen to it over again and figure out where the simple thing that hooked you is.

There is already a powerful base of fascinating hooks and catches here- in the relationship between Nadia’s voice and the viola, and Dan’s and the sax and the reggae-ish rhythm and drums- but a next level is clearly attainable, and this will have to come from the singable lines of the songs.

Dress Whites, who took the stage before Shoot the Moon, have already hit on one of these lucky sound breaks. Their second to last piece contained a switch to a minor chord that somehow coloured the whole song and characterized the whole band. Suddenly everyone was smiling and saying “I like these guys” and tapping all their trendy, grubby, pointy, sweaty toes. Dress Whites’ singer found a wry, rocking, melancholy twist on the strait country road the song was on, and it stretched out to define the band, the moment, and something in all of us. This is the kind of phase transition that is still to come for Shoot the Moon- and if we’re lucky we’ll all get to be there some night to be a part of it.

Check out Shoot the Moon’s website at http://www.shootthemoon.ca/

Thanks to Elran especially, but also Jess Pare and Emilie Marzinotto, for the perceptive opinions they shared with me for this piece.

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[ originally posted on Saturday, July 16th, 2005 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Everything, Media. ]