Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Moon, Willy
Label: Island Records
Released: 08.04.2013
Length: 28:53
Rating: 3.5/5
What this 23-year-old brings to the scene is a clever mix of past and present: a lanky beanpole with a hairdo freshly glossed with brilliantine, dressed old-school in a tuxedo. He’s a New Zealander named William George Sinclair, stage name Willy Moon, and he pulls it off.
For his age, the guy is seriously bold, since he mashes old-school pop tunes of the fifties and sixties together with newfangled stuff like trip hop, hip hop, even techno, and the outlines of some scheming with alternative rock are clear too. Hmmm… don’t go looking for a link to Elvis right off the bat, better not. It’s more in the »provocatively showy« pop-tune craft of a mishmash of rock n’ roll, swing, rhythm and blues, soul, doo-wop. The works of Litlle Willy John could be close (most of you probably know his hit Fever? the album even includes a cover of his I’m Shakin’), the blues swing excursions of saxophonist and singer Bull Moose Jackson, the doo-wop trotting down the tracks of The Crescendos, The Clovers, The Platters, the early rock n’ roll excesses of Little Richard’s piercing vocals…. All of them, of course, passionate fans of shaving foam, just like our Willy. And where there’s doo wop, there’s of course a faint whiff of gospel, almost theatrical, cinematic preaching in select melodies, and you can even pull out a bit of »surfing« à la The Beach Boys (the opening trick in Yeah Yeah), unbelievable. This album would surely have been laughed off the stage if it hadn’t come out in 2013. The time is obviously right, the time gap just right, decades are spinning by at the speed of light, and Chubby Checker is surely turning in his grave. This relaxed, carefree record, »Here’s Willy Moon«, comes across as fun and tickling at most, even though it doesn’t bring any musical revolution. Commercially, though, it’s effectively breaking the ice for Willy! Given all of the above, it’s no surprise that a cover of I Put A Spell On You is included, which originally belongs to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. It’s up to you to pick which you like better, the Nina Simone one or Willy’s current take.
The man keeps up modern production tricks, where the sonic backdrop is stripped of organic rhythms and propped up with programmed Apple loops that try to replicate the sound of the horn and string arrangements of tunes from the long, long-gone past, lying on a bare, minimalist »sampled beat« that keeps the dance-floor lightness going. The latter coexists wonderfully with the clipped, snappy verses of Willy Moon’s vocals, which are here and there harmonized with added vocal choirs, which gratefully loosens up the otherwise predictable form of the songs. Occasional, almost instinctively driven vocal »bites«, with which Willy chops up the melody, often in jerks bordering on hip hop or on the already mentioned piercing quality of old-school Little Richard, the path later rock n’ roll dilettantes followed, led by the master of melody-twisting David Bowie, are in the next moment brought close to a tangible melody. That in no way brings Willy close to, say, Ben E. King’s Stand By Me, but songs like Working For The Company or the especially »mellifluous« Fire and My Girl are exactly what neutralizes the clipped, put-on vocal performance that’s all over the album.
No rocket science, you’d say. You just have to get an idea, have enough guts to try it out and make it happen. What Willy has adopted from the old school is also the running time of the songs, which is extremely short, that is, between two and three minutes per song. That’s why the album doesn’t even reach half an hour in length. Willy allows himself a special sonic experiment on the instrumental Murder Ballad. At the end there’s a dark song with alternative-rock contours, a mix of trip-hop samples on a simple rhythmic structure, sprinkled with a schizoid frenzy of guitar playing that modern-day masters of minimalism Jack White on one side and our good old attractive troublemaker Marilyn Manson on the other could put to sensible use in their own musical-experiment excursions (oh, and by the way, Marilyn also covered I Put A Spell On Yoiu, since we’re mentioning him). This song hints that there’s still more hiding behind Willy Moon’s authorial paradigm than the debut offers.
»Here’s Willy Moon« is an album that’s successfully breaking the ice and buying attention on the scene, which is why they offered the musician a deal right at the start at Island Records. In terms of creative authorship, Willy Moon isn’t reinventing the wheel. He just picks and combines carefully. Old ideas. The music on »Here’s Willy Moon« is set up so that you have to watch it and listen to it at the same time. That’s when it works at full power. It’s largely anchored in dance steps. Anyone who caught last year’s Urbani festival at Križanke in Ljubljana could see with their own eyes how masterfully Willy Moon uses the form of his songs on stage for his theater. The minimalism of arranging a generally predictable form is perfectly dosed with the energy surplus of testosterone in this untamed young man’s blood. No need to guess twice that Willy has fused the dance steps of Chubby Checker and Elvis Presley into one.
Lineup
Willy Moon – vocals, arrangements, programming
Production
Willy Moon
Tracklist
- Get Up
- Railroad Track
- Yeah Yeah
- What I Want
- Fire
- I Wanna Be Your Man
- Working for the Company
- Shakin’
- She Loves Me
- I Put a Spell On You
- My Girl
- Murder Ballad
