I can't remember exactly when I heard The Soft Moon for the first time, but I know it was in 2015 on KEXP. I was enthralled with the couple of tracks I heard and vowed to find out more about the band, but the urge kept slipping my mind. One day, in the summer, I was digging through the used CDs at Red Cat Records in Vancouver and came across Deeper for $5. I bought it on sight.
Taking it home and popping it into my CD player was a revelation. After the first listen through, Deeper lived in my player for about a week straight. I bet I listened to it about 25 times just in that week. And I've continutally come back to it over the past year and into 2016.
The Soft Moon is Luis Vasquez, who lives in San Francisco. His music is an intriguing mish-mash of styles, firmly rooted in the percussive, dark and driving post-punk that Joy Division was best known for. There's a goth element in the tracks too, with Vasquez' half-buried, moaned vocals rising up through the angular music. There's also an odd, almost dance-floor friendly European electronic style to the album, heard in tracks like "Wrong".
The best track on the album is the third track, "Far", which teams a punding electronic beat with warped synth and guitar into a disorienting landscape.
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