Summer Moon
With You Tonight
DTF/Membran
This is it.
We finally have The Strokes side project we’ve been waiting for. Their bassist Nikolai Fraiture has teamed up with Camila Grey (of Uh Huh Her), Stephen Perkins (Jane’s Addiction) and Noah Harmon (Airborne Toxic Event) to create Summer Moon whose debut album, With You Tonight, fulfills the promise made by those gloriously jangly guitars and grunged-out bass tones in a way that even the last Strokes album didn’t make good on. Imagine everything you loved about those first few Strokes records, but replace the leather jacket thrift store ultra coolness with some ’80s new wave. Less drunken late nights, more tipsy early evenings enjoyed immensely, but responsibly. The kids have grown up, but they’re still going out, get it?
“Happenin’” kicks things off with a seductive melody and a thumping groove that sounds like the laid back older brother of “Juicebox” (The Strokes First Impressions of Earth). “With You” dials the tone back to a cruising vibe that’s like a smooth red wine buzz on a rainy night. The sprightly uptake of the guitar dances around Fraiture’s low range vocals while electronic claps accentuate the beat in the background and the result falls on the scale somewhere between Information Society and Cut Copy. “L.I.T.A.” has a similar feel, “Girls On” is a straight up John Hughes lovefest that feels like Some Kind of Wonderful, and then there’s “Cleopatra,” the dark horse winner of the record that duets Fraiture with the otherwise underused Camila Grey. Remember how excited you’d get when you’d hear Kim Deal sing lead vocals on a Pixies record? This is that.
Their have been A LOT of offshoots of The Strokes (Albert Hammond, Jr., Little Joy, Julian Casablancas and The Voidz, Nickel Eye, CRX), but Summer Moon is, so far, the most exhilarating.
