Half Moon Panic

If music was packaged like food, this would be the equivalent of a tempting looking half baguette so crammed with delicious looking filling that the contents tumble out of the side. Sometimes of course you find that there’s not much content inside. Happily, this cracking little three song EP is full of Melodic Rock, leaving the listener more than pleasantly satisfied.

The sound quality is a definite improvement on debut album, 'Welcome To the Small Time', much richer and with a lot of depth, capturing the multi-layered guitars of Taj Mian to good effect. He provides some really nice playing throughout, with a combination of low end crunchy part chords and flowing melodic riffs that weave in and out of the vocals.

Lead singer and bassist Gerard Jacques is effective on vocals and is at his best on ‘Second Time Around’, which could be the band’s rallying cry. He’s ably supported by James Dixon on drums to create a strong backbone for the numbers. This track also features some nice Hammond playing by Benedict Holland, which helps expand the sound. Actually, a bit more keyboards wouldn’t have gone amiss to add the cherry on top of the cake.

The songs are thoughtful and straightforwardly explore themes like the beauty of the world and its people (on ‘Beautiful Place’) and the value of ordinary people and the celebration of family on ‘Sacrifice’, a track which features an excellent picked guitar part on multiple guitars, with some chiming harmonics adding colour.

This short taster should appeal to most folk that enjoy guitar based music that starts with a song rather than relying on a song being created from a series of riffs like some musical Frankenstein.


Simon Green