The Big Moon shine bright on new record ‘Here is Everything’
Oh, what a joy it is to listen to a record that is happy to sound ecstatically pleasant. The Big Moon have not succumbed to the twisted notion of having to evolve in some sort of experimental, dissonant fashion for their third album, Here is Everything. The soaring swell that the first track, ‘2 Lines’, gathers towards forecasts this smooth labour from the off.
Within this embalming sound is a bold sense of sentiment. The melodic atmosphere provides a perfect canvas for emotions to be explored. The rigours of pregnancy and other such topics that, for some reason, don’t get the airtime they should in music are courageously elucidated in a manner as sincere as the sound of the songs. And above it all is the sense of a band still having fun, giving the music an air of salvation. Demons are exorcised, and the verity and vitality of the songwriting make this an exultant experience more so than an overbearing one.
Jules Jackson perfect captures the mood of the record when discussing one of its more triumphant songs, ‘Wide Eyes’: “I was desperate to write a really big, happy song. My soul was overflowing with the joy of something, but I was too physically and mentally exhausted to actually string words together and define it and make music with it. In late 2021, I met Jessica Winter who came into my life like an angel and helped me turn those jumbled feelings into a song and I think it’s just a mad snapshot of a time when life just felt huge and holy and raw and incredible.”
It also feels very real. Beneath the soaring production scope is a warming humility. As Jackson explains: “I was nursing a five month old baby, I was barely sleeping, I was losing my hair, I was pumping and sweating and crying and lonely and only just about coping, but amongst all that, I felt a burning love and a new kind of happiness. I guess the world felt innocent again. For a while anyway.”
This window of eudemonia is savoured in the soundtrack to this period of Jackson’s life, and it shines a ray of it into your own. It isn’t saccharine or rose-tinted, the sweating and crying are still wrung out in the odd minor chords or mellow moment—this isn’t candy floss pop. There is a temperance to all the songs that brings the lingering miasma of a teenage Kurt Cobain obsession into a sunnier Alvvays adult disposition.
If Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends plays out like a conversation with an old friend, then Here is Everything feels like a pals night down the pub. It doesn’t attempt to blow your socks into neck week, but it certainly rattles them down to your ankles, and this buoyant energy is a balm to soothe out any problems.
All the while, it happily wavers and serves you up a smorgasbord. Just like that pub night, it doesn’t get stuck in a single groove for too long, waxing and waning, and drafting on to new topics and feels. In short, it is a very complete and accomplished album that lands like a warm ray of sun on a cold autumn day—sit in it for a while; it’s good for you.
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