Davey Dreamnation

DNRC089 | LP | 2018 | DELETED

Strange retro-fitted space capsule band Waning Gibbous checked out of the collective sub-conscious some time in 2019, making this their last and, in some respects, worst album. In others, it resembles nothing so much as the scene of an aircrash investigation - a random smash-wreckage ensemble of rivets, torn metal and smoking ash. Still, on opening track “Houston” we see the band exhibiting its trademark wit in a barely-concealed tribute to Whitney Houston, the first of the 1980s pop stars to go into space. Elsewhere, “Fountain Pen”, “This Monkey’s Gone To Houston” and “Whitney” trade on the same riff, interspersing plaintive wails with snippets of Houston’s own songs. It is on Waning Gibbous’ attempt at a cover version however - not surprisingly, a rabblehouse rendition of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know (If He Really Loves Me?)” - that the first of this moon patrol buggy of an album’s many and various wheels begins to fall off. Literally. You can hear the penny dropping on surprisingly spacey interlude “Sound Of The Penny Drop” and what follows, over the course of seventy eight more minutes of excruciating pule, is a harrowing document of a band falling out of orbit, gradually losing contact with Houston, drinking each others’ urine as the supplies dwindle, penning one or two final words in closing, before the radio goes dead, and the spacecraft, unlike everything else in the universe, stops. It is at this point that the listener, thinking their ordeal is finally over, removes headphones, calls up the music playlist on their air GUI, identifies offending ’songs’, strips them of all classifying data and then deposits them, with a quick swish of a wii-trained hand, into the virtual dustbin that, no matter how technologically-savvy we get, will always be marked “deleted”. But we all know it’s not as simple as that, is it? Because this album hasn’t even been released yet, and won’t be for another ten years.