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LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
GENRE: shoegaze, desert rock, folk and soul,Alt Rock
INFLUENCES: Slowdive, Bjork, Annie Lennox, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield
PUBLICIST : kaytea moreno elst / kaytea@xopublicity.com / 503.539.7691
Bio
MOON is a duo made up of Chelsea Dawn on vocals and drums, and Dan Silver on guitars and synths. Dawn was born in a farming and mining town called Price; Silver was the son of British immigrants who landed in Cincinnati. They’ve been making their thunderous music since the release of debut The Heart, with a sound of electronically-enhanced incantations with songwriting to the fore, swarming around the radiant, poetic lyrical messages.
Shine is their new release, and it shows them taking Dawn’s majestic vocals, featuring a magnificent intensity and lush, brassy emotionalism, infusing their rich, lustrous range of sound into twisted eerie soundscapes upon mountainous sonic vistas perfect for their Southern California region. Dawn and Silver met in a collaborative writing session, and later their first single was used in the USA Network’s show “Colony.”
With MOON producing themselves and mixing everything at Silver’s Victory Road Studio, each of the five songs - the opening title track “Shine,” “Never Cross Me,” “Sweetest Magic,” “Down by The Water,” and “My Oh My (I’ll Take You Home)” — all co-written together, reaching a rapturous zenith, like Annie Lennox fronting the best backslidden soul-gospel band from rattlesnake country, or Depeche Mode taking peyote and tapping into cowboy prayers. With starkly hooky, ambient-kissed infectious arrangements, these are all paradoxically pseudo-feral anthems with stripped-back rock and dense lattices of splendor. Each one could cruelly crush radio in New Weird America.
These billowing cathedrals of sound with jaw-dropping flourishes “explore human emotion in such a way that reaches as many people as we can,” Dawn says. “My personal input has been a process of leaving my childhood religion and moving forward as an individual.” The epic “Shine” is autobiographical for the musical partners, confessing struggles but also “looking for the positives at the end of every experience. ‘What makes you shine?’ Should always be more important than ‘What makes you mad?’” Silver adds, “In a time when everyone seems to be down, we all could use a feeling of confidence.”
The instantaneously-created ‘“Never Cross Me” about says it all,” Silver says, “when it comes to life experiences we both have many stories to tell, and some days you just don’t want to mess with us.” Dawn admits that “My (Oh My)” is deep from her heart, as it “has a lot of my old friends and family in it. From designated driver to on call therapist, I’m here for it.”
Even though Silver is a full-time producer with many albums to his credit, with his own studio, MOON worked on their first album with Mark Needham (The Killers, Moby, Fleetwood Mac). “It was unbelievable to witness his wizardry.” But the duo is constantly learning, and were excited to produce the new release together, “proud at the quality of the finished product.”
Dawn had received the Performer of the Year award from her college Alma Mater, where the student newspaper compared her to Keith Moon and percussionist Evelyn Glennie. She started playing with Silver when she filled in on bass with one of his previous bands live, including shows opening for 20 Seconds to Mars. She’d had quite a career as a full-time professional player, in her own bands and others’ on the road, in groups like The Start, Normandie, Modified by Man, CB7, and PARTYBABY.
The band’s name comes from a shared affinity in subjects like the Cosmos, and the connectedness of the human race as a species. “Both Sagan fans,” Silver admits, and adds, “Our name expresses an exceptional gravitational pull that we’re all attracted to.”