Luna The Aliens Reviewed By : Lisa Wright

Resurrected from the ashes of The Beta Band, The Aliens (aka Gordon Anderson, John Maclean and Robin Jones) concoct the kind of harmonious prog/pop/folk mix-ups reminiscent of early Floyd or, more recently, fellow underappreciated misfits, The Shortwave Set. And that’s just in the first track (a 10-minute epic entitled ‘Bobby's Song’). Listen to another, ‘Amen’ for example, and you get an entirely different landscape of musical reference points, in this case: church organs and a sort of apocalypse. I never said they were conventional reference points. And, as you slowly puzzle through the intricate concoction that is ‘Luna’, the true schizophrenic diversity of this particular three-piece becomes evident. ‘Billy Jack’ opens with a hazy prog build-up, that could happily fit into any Yes track, yet culminates in the kind of spine-tingling harmonies that Neil Young or America would be proud of, whereas ‘Boats’ channels a Band of Horses-esque strain of heartbreaking melancholy, and ‘Smoggy Bog’ keeps the spirit of Syd Barrett alive in precisely 1:53. The only strange thing is the choice of ‘Magic Man’, arguably the least interesting track on the album, as the lead single.

The beauty of all this is that while The Aliens sound a little bit like a whole host of other bands, there really is no-one at the moment who sounds at all like them. For this, ‘Luna’ is a record to be nurtured, give it some time and an open mind and there’s all manner of rewards to be reaped, and, if nothing else, cherish it for its defiant resistance to conformity or any passing scene. Long live the outsider; long live The Aliens.

8/10

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