The Daily Spin, September 3
Moonchild | Little Ghost
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
Album: Little Ghost (2019)
Artist: Moonchild
Link:
Gentle, easy, and deliciously symphonic - the best way I can think to describe Moonchild’s delightful fourth release, Little Ghost. With such an obviously comfortable handle on their soundspace, it’s no shock that everything about this album is so tightly poured onto canvas, a little dollop of this and a pinch of the other to create an ideal.
In a weird way, I’m left feeling as though it’s almost too tight. The entire idea behind jazzy music like this is the way it should, in an ideal sense, be free, as a bird to the sky or a river undammed - but in their effort to be so rock-solid in the production, some of those wild moments have been lost, or worse, feel falsified.
It’s not entirely shocking, because a fairly common framing at this point in time is to do this sort of slightly constructed fantasy, control the ‘miscues’ and the veering such that it looks real while being tightly puppeteered - but in this case, that’s just an error, and I’m not really sure what else to say about it.
Beyond a pervasive sameness in sound, though, that’s about the biggest nitpick I have with this album - that it feels like they tried to make mistakes to tarnish the actual record. Pretty good.
Rating: 8.8/10
Best Tracks: Come Over; Strength
Worst Tracks: Nova