Circles
The first two Moon Duo releases were casual affairs that succeeded, at least in part, because Wooden Shjips’ Erik Johnson and keyboardist Sanae Yamada adopted a relaxed, low-stakes approach to music-making. This seemed to encourage instrumental spontaneity and musical exploration, blending the simplest of rock \'n\' roll chord progressions with the metronomic pulse of Krautrock and extended guitar excursions. On *Circles*, Moon Duo continues to employ these techniques, but its approach is decidedly more rigorous and its songwriting and production are more polished. *Circles* is unquestionably Moon Duo’s most accomplished album to date, though it lacks some of the gleeful impulsiveness that made earlier efforts like *Escape* and *Mazes* such a pleasure to listen to. That’s not to say that Moon Duo’s newfound seriousness hasn’t brought its own share of rewards; the propulsive “Sleepwalker,\" for instance, might be its most fully realized song to date, while the album’s title track is an imminently danceable marriage of the barbed noise pop of ‘80s acts like Spacemen 3 and the experimentations of early electronic pioneers like The Silver Apples.
On their Ralph Waldo Emerson-referencing latest album, Wooden Shjips guitarist Erik "Ripley" Johnson and keyboardist Sanae Yamada seem anxious to bolster their sound while still remaining sinister, groovy, and far-and-fuzzed-out.
Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada's second album is inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson and circles, and it's a powerful amalgam of pysch, drone and noise-pop.
On their third full-length, Moon Duo come down decidedly more on 2011's Mazes' end of the scale than they do on either Escape or Killing Time from 2010.
Moon Duo’s debut Mazes invited its listeners to get lost in a sonic labyrinth of stargazing krautrock jams. The title of successor Circles evokes a more simple form of immersion, a single line without beginning or end, emblematic of the way the San Franciscan couple’s songs repeat and revolve around minimal components.