The Moon – The Moon (1998)

Unvinyl #13

When I was in my teens, my favourite part of working on a fanzine and doing tape trading was the intense mail exchange. Snail mail, as we would call it, while email was slowly emerging as a faster alternative for quick written messages. The internet was not powerful enough (yet) to allow the exchange of big files or anything like that, so any delivery involving music had to be strictly traditional.

It might sound odd today, but back then returning home from a vacation was almost as exciting as taking off, because there was usually a pile of interesting packages waiting for us. It was indeed after coming home from a few days at the beach with my family that, among several padded envelopes, I found a folder from Surgeland Records, a small indie label out of Atlanta. The included press release boldly billed its new protégés as “The Who meets The Beatles”. Behind the claim was The Moon, a band of Dutch rockers who’d traded leather and swagger for a more classic touch.

Indeed, they were not rookies. Frontman Andrew Elt and guitarist Don Van Spall had once found some success with Sleeze Beez before Seattle’s wave washed away most of the ’80s hard rock scene. Drummer John Snels had done his time with metal heroes Vengeance, while Paul Martin completed the Zeppelin-style lineup on bass and piano.

In an era far from kind to survivors of the previous decade, Elt was quick to draw a line between past and present. “Even though Don and I had been playing together for years, we’d never actually written anything as a pair,” he told me when I interviewed him for my old fanzine back then. “With The Moon, we wanted to move away from the prefab formulas that shaped almost every Sleeze Beez song. I still love those tracks, but we felt the need to do something deeper”.

That intent runs through all thirteen tracks of The Moon’s self-titled debut. Firmly rooted in the best of ’70s classic rock yet surprisingly versatile, the album finds its common ground in Elt’s melodic instinct. He shines both on tougher, post-grunge-tinged cuts like ‘Ain’t Losin’ My Way’ and on the more reflective, Beatles-flavored songs ‘What Is It’ and ‘What Do I Know’. The latter opens almost like a Mellencamp ballad and leads perfectly into the country warmth of ‘Sunrise’, featuring Van Spall on vocals.

The record’s range doesn’t stop there. The power pop of ‘I’ll Come Around’ and the boozy finale ‘Fashion Louse’—including some wild honky tonk piano and a kazoo solo—deserve special mention. It’s that variety Elt took particular pride in. “The trouble with most bands today,” he noted, “is that every song sounds the same. In the ’60s and ’70s, groups wrote in all sorts of styles—labels didn’t call all the shots”.

Had ‘The Moon’ arrived a few years later, it might have slipped neatly into the 2000s wave of ’70s revivalism and raised the bar a notch, as the band had much more personality than many young copycats. But in the late ’90s, with rock still nursing its grunge hangover, the album struggled to find its place and ultimately went largely unnoticed.

A second record was started but never completed. Elt kept himself busy in music, working as tour manager for blues rock veteran Walter Trout and, after a short-lived Sleeze Beez reunion around 2010, fronting a new band called 7 Miles To Pittsburgh, which takes the classic rock spirit of The Moon and drives it even further into zeppelinesque territory.

CHANCES OF VINYLIZATION: Very low, I would assume. Not even sure about who currently owns the rights to the recordings. However, both 7 Miles To Pittsburgh albums were released on vinyl too and that might hint at an interest in the format.

🟥 Unvinyl is a series of articles about great music not available on vinyl (at the time of writing). A full index can be found here.