The Big Moon - Here Is Everything Review
On their third LP The Big Moon give us everything.
Here is Everything is the third album from London-based The Big Moon, and a lot has changed since they released their second album Walking Like We Do, in January 2020. The pandemic had thrown a wrench into many bands’ plans, and the quartet were no different. Despite the success of Walking Like We Do, the timing of its release meant things were put on hold. To adjust to the new reality vocalist, Juliette Jackson found herself teaching fans to play guitar on Zoom to pay the bills — including, to her amazement, Courtney Love. Here is Everything may have been conceived during the bleakness of the pandemic, but when Jackson had a baby towards the end of the lockdown, she knew what she had to write about, and this new life force flows through the record’s eleven songs.
The band’s alt-pop is wrapped in that slightly dark-shimmering-reverb sound — like they’re playing in a Berlin club in a 1980s Wim Wender’s movie — which can be overplayed, ending up being the only quality to a lot of bands. This is not the case with The Big Moon.
There is more to them than just a sound. This album is basically just full of heartfelt, stupidly catchy songs. The beautiful wave-crashing-like choruses on songs like “Wide Eyes”, “Daydreaming”, “My Very Best”, “Ladye Bay”, “Trouble”, and “High and Low” — are expansive and feel-goody and so goddamn positive, you can’t not fall under their spell! This is shadowed by the moodier strains of songs like “2 Lines” and “Suckerpunch”, which add emotional and musical depth to the album.
Jackson has said about the process of recording the album, “we have loved every minute of being back together and doing what we do.” This is very apparent. The Big Moon sounds like a band enjoying playing together, and that comes out in the driving zeal of the music. Not just in Jackson’s searching lyrics about motherhood and giving birth to a new life — delivered with her beguiling vocals, but in the myriad of textures and sounds of Soph Nathan’s guitar-playing and the pulsing rhythm section of drummer Fern Ford and Bass player Celia Archer.
On the song “Suckerpunch”, a simmering alt-country ode to the uncertainty of the future, Jackson sings, “You’ve been waiting for the future like a heavyweight champion, but when you think you’ve beat the underdog, she lands a sucker punch.” To which the band respond, “I guess I still could be surprised.”
Well, you always hope — The Big Moon definitely have.