Eva Luna

Background

Led by former Wolfhound David Callahan and ex-Ultra Vivid Scene member Margaret Fiedler, Moonshake had first come to attention with the First EP, released on Creation Records in 1990, which had blended various experimental rock leanings with an interest in sampling technology, but which had been too much anchored to the indie rock/noise-rock tastes of the time, and which Callahan felt had also brought them an undeserved reputation as "shoegazey bandwagon jumpers." They'd followed up by signing to the Too Pure label and releasing the Secondhand Clothes and Beautiful Pigeon EPs, both which better incorporated their interest in the dub-bass-heavy post-punk sound of bands such as Public Image Limited and The Pop Group, and which also began gaining critical attention due to the band's unusual sample-driven and rhythmically propulsive sound drawing on breakbeats, electronica, psychedelia, art rock and Krautrock.

Moonshake had also developed a method of alternating between the different song-stylings of Callahan and Fiedler – each of whom contributed, sang and dominated songs which were simultaneously fleshed out and expanded by the other in terms of extra instrumentation and production ideas. Building on what he'd already achieved with The Wolfhounds, Callahan favoured a direct post-punk/garage rock approach with strident "bellow[ed] and sneer[ed]" vocals and lyrics featuring social awareness, social commentary and angry satire. Fiedler, in contrast, whispered or murmured most of her vocals, and created more impressionistic songs focussed on interior psychological landscapes and surreal takes on emotions, relationships and responses. This was later described by Louder Than War as making Moonshake, in effect, "two different bands in a head-on crush-collision. Which to all intents and purposes it was."

In spite of their different methods, Callahan and Fiedler were at this stage very appreciative and supportive of each other's work, being quite prepared to alternate the front-person role both in terms of songwriting and singing. Callahan has reflected "if you listen to the line-up with her and me, it's a schizophrenic band... It's got a dual personality. We did occasionally write songs together, but we were mostly flipsides to each other... But we'd also play with it more and have really noisy bits in her quiet songs and occasional really quiet bits in my noisy songs. The whole thing was meant to blend. There were definitely a lot of contradictions there, but that's interesting in a band, isn't it?"

Writing and recording

Eva Luna was recorded over the summer and early autumn of 1992, at the now-defunct First Protocol Studios in Highbury, London (their sessions overlapping with some of the sessions for My Bloody Valentine's Loveless).

During the recording of the Secondhand Clothes and Beautiful Pigeon EPs, Moonshake had persistently experimented with deconstructing and dismantling their songs in the studio. Regarding the former, Callahan remembers "Margaret [spending] most of the session with headphones, on a sampler, just trying to match things to the music. She turned a song I wrote into something a bit more forward-looking... And then when we got to the studio, we took it apart more. It was all about deconstruction and putting it back together in different ways. And it worked really well."

This approach was carried over into, and further refined in, the Eva Luna sessions. Callahan credited much of this approach to the influence of Gang Starr and other hip hop acts, "slowing things down, playing the stereo one a bit slower then the other one a bit faster, running things backwards, playing the samples like an instrument.... We really loved that. We thought, "Well, we can do the same and perhaps we can write songs with this stuff."..." He also mentions "the way-out Stooges of Fun House, where they had Steve Mackay playing sax" being an influence on the album.

The album's lyrical subject matter was often uncompromising, taking in at various times urban alienation, English insularity, prostitution and sex-murder, ecological issues and abortion. Louder Than War has commented "[Callahan's songs] are all angry, vitriolic diatribes about human injustice and dysfunctional societal subjects set to keening, urgently propulsive arrangements, underpinned by those huge dub basslines, off-kilter hip hop drum patterns and topped with shards of acidic, coruscating post-punk guitars with all kinds of disorientating samples thrown into the mix: bhangra motifs, shrieking brass and saxophone interjections (although some of these are also played live), detuned keyboard effects, creaking doors, machinery, etc." The same review commented on Fiedler's vocal approach, deeming it "more subtle and cryptically insidious : never has the art of whispered vocals carried with it such an air of true menace and unease. Whilst Fiedler's vocals may be low in the mix, the discordant maelstrom that whips around her, sometimes delivered through defiantly obtuse jazzy time signatures, creates an even greater sense of dislocation. The fact that many of her lyrics concern psychological dread, neurotic sexual obsessions or depravity, and suburban paranoia, merely accentuates this. Due to this dichotomy, the dynamic shifts on some of her compositions are, if anything, even more polarised and extreme than those of her writing partner, who favours a more direct and "straight between the eyes" approach."

Releases and reissue

Original release

Eva Luna was released in the UK and France by Too Pure on 26 October 1992. An American release (featuring a reshuffled tracklisting and the addition of the songs from the Secondhand Clothes EP) followed on Atlantic Records/Matador Records in 1993. Cover art in both cases was by "King of Fuck", a.k.a. Mat Ducasse, a member of Skylab.

2020/2023 reissues

After years of being out of print and unavailable for download, Eva Luna was reissued in download-only format by Too Pure (by that time, part of the Beggars Banquet group) in 2020.

In 2023, a full remastered version followed in both vinyl and download formats, via Beggars Arkive. Callahan and Fiedler contributed to the process of remastering and repackaging the record. The reissue featured the US track order with the addition of the Secondhand Clothes EP and the B-sides from the Beautiful Pigeon EP ("Beeside" and "Home Survival Kit"). It also included versions of four songs from Moonshake's BBC John Peel radio sessions. The Peel Session recordings were also released separately on vinyl as part of Beggars Arkive's 2024 BBC Radio Sessions project, as one of ten vinyl discs purchased and received via subscription.

Critical reception

Contemporary reviews

In New Musical Express, John Mulvey enthused "forget the claims of '70s revivalists — however attractive their music — to be the guardians of British music, Moonshake sound exactly how a band lost in London, 1992, and caught in the cultural crossfire should: vivid, intense, discomforting, fuelled by a sonic crush collision where truculent avant-rock is brilliantly mangled with hip hop, dub, free jazz, bhangra and a sense-scrambling barrage of samples. Hell, this is ambitious stuff… [This is] an exceptional record. Moonshake never cheapen their stories, never exploit their subjects, never preach or pass judgement… The result is an endlessly challenging, confrontational social document, no less. It demands your serious respect." The album was voted into the magazine's top 50 records of the year (at number 41), with the EP "Secondhand Clothes" being voted the 28th best single of the year.

In The Wire, Kevin Martin followed a similar train of thought to Mulvey, stating "Moonshake are city dwellers enthralled and appalled by urban dog-eat-dog survivalism. On Eva Luna tales of love and loathing are set in a cosmopolitan dub zone, where disparate styles clash and the musical bulk is shadowed by relentless percussion and furtive sampled figures... Fiedler's torched singing sounds traumatised – as her sinister whispers outline internal persecutions in a Lewis Carroll world of beasts and birds. Callahan’s unforgiving raps initially overpowers with brute rhetoric... Moonshake are perfecting their own flow motion capable of matching Can... but where the flow of ‘70s German rock craved spiritual freedom and open spaces, Moonshake are moved by claustrophobia and enforced confinement. Their rhythmic mobility, shrouded by endless loops and discords, maps out an inner city neurosis which rivals PiL's "Death Disco" for Low End disturbance and Uneasy Listening."

In Melody Maker, Jim Irvin struck a more cautious note, commenting that "Eva Luna is Moonshake's big book of wild stories... There's a sting in every tale, too – Moonshake are designed to unsettle – and a collection that proves they've quietly grown into tone of the most original groups we’ve got. But loveable?... There's a pervading sense of Inner City Dope Dole Hippy about them, something a bit grimy and squatty with an ugly underside... Such abrasiveness is in danger of making Moonshake that most hideous of things: worthy. Yuk. It threatens to turn their music into something you admire rather than love, but then I feel the same about Can, the Fall, Captain Beefheart, things which infuse the Moonshake sound [which] can be as wild and humid and all-consuming as a thunderstorm... They display a refreshing willingness to explore, an aural sense of adventure... It's deadly serious. Deadly full stop. Delightfully difficult listening."

Retrospective reviews

In 1999, Eva Luna was voted 77th out of the top 100 LPs of the 1990s in Alternative Press. In 2005, the Italian magazine Blow Up included it in its list of "600 Essential Albums".

In AllMusic, Steve Huey reflected that "Eva Luna is bursting with ideas and tension; dissonant instrumental lines careen off of both samples and spacey dream pop textures, resting on a bed of hypnotic dub bass grooves and deliberate, deeply funky percussion... Callahan delivers his tales of despairing cynicism and rage over modern urban life with theatrical growls and nasal wails, while Fiedler's hushed murmurs and understated purr belie the aggression lurking under her songs' often nightmarish psycho-sexual dramas. Above all, Eva Luna's sound collages are dark and edgy, regardless of whether their overall tone is mellow or furious; the album's dense layers of sonic detail and the ebb and flow between Callahan and Fiedler's contrasting songwriting styles make it a richly inventive, endlessly fascinating listen..." In a Trouser Press overview of Moonshake's work, Douglas Wolk described the music of Eva Luna as being "always big, weird and unnerving", singling out "the whomping single "Beautiful Pigeon"" and "Callahan's best song, a cancerous dub-rock slither called "City Poison"."

A 2008 posting on the Young British Nationalist blog (covering "Rock Music: The Definitive History") mentioned Moonshake in connection with 1990s British post-rock. It described Eva Luna as having "reduced the song format to a plasma of rhythmic and melodic fragments on [its] atmospheric experiments... A bold synthesis of psychedelia, trip-hop and jazz, [Moonshake's] sound basically upgraded Public Image Ltd.'s sound to the age of sampling."

Writing eighteen years after the album's release, for a 2010 feature in Tiny Mix Tapes, Lavi Che stated that "Moonshake should by all rights be legendary. However, they remain one of the most distressingly slept-on bands of the 1990s, dropping three albums and a handful of singles and EPs that earned deserved critical plaudits but — as often proves the case with bands that test and warp one’s conception of music — failed to find much of an audience, although they weren’t outright ignored... Moonshake's records have aged really well in the past 15-20 years. Most of their songs sound like they were committed to tape just yesterday… Eva Luna is a hard album to immerse yourself in, requiring multiple listens (as in the case of this reviewer) before it really clicks." Che named "Seen and Not Heard" as the record's highlight, stating that "in this reviewer’s subjective and inflated opinion (it) should have done for music in 1992 what "Smells Like Teen Spirit" did for 1991."

Reissue reviews

The reissue of the album in 2023 provided the opportunity for further reviews and coverage, now with thirty years of further perspective. Awarding the record 9-out-of-10 in their in-house reviews pages, Norman Records referred to it as "one of the most underrated debuts of the Nineties. A thrilling collision of sampledelia, shoegaze and post-punk - imagine if someone put early hip hop, My Bloody Valentine and PiL in a blender..."

Reviewing the reissue for Brainwashed, Anthony D'Amico revealed "listening to this expanded reissue now with considerably more adventurous ears, I still find this album oft-frustrating, but I am newly struck by how almost every song features at least one moment where Moonshake sounded like the best band on the goddamn planet... While the swirling chaos of the crescendo of "Mugshot Heroine" stands as an especially unhinged and wonderful moment, nearly every song contains at least one god-tier noise freakout or killer sample and every song features an absolutely stellar rhythm section (John Frenett and "Mig" Moreland) that can rival PiL or Can at their best (groove-wise, at least). Someone really needs to produce an instrumental dub companion from these masters with all the '90s alt rock elements stripped away, as it would be an absolute banger."

D'Amico appreciated the inclusion of the two Fiedler-era Moonshake EPs, Secondhand Clothes and Beautiful Pigeon, judging them "generally every bit as good as Eva Luna...The band's previously bootleg-only 1992 Peel Session is a bit of an inspired inclusion as well, as Callahan and Fiedler switch vocal duties for alternate versions of a few of their strongest songs... Moonshake at their best rivals the finest work of any of their more revered influences or contemporaries."

In another extensive essay (on Medium), Melissa Thyme Monroe drew attention to the band's use of noise rock (at a time when the genre was under-explored within British music as compared to the American scene), as well as commenting on their employment of psychedelic approaches and their connections with trip hop. Monroe also took note of the effects of the dual songwriter approach in terms of both art and politics. "There’s an ebb and flow generated on the album that waves between the bombastic pain of city life and the insidiousness of empty houses. The original sequencing does this dynamic justice, juxtaposing these songs right next to each other. The lyricism from both songwriters contrast in a much similar way, with Fiedler diverting from her relatively conscious counterpart by creating whispery poetry around odd, uncomfortable imagery like pot-bellied she-wolves and animals eating other animals..."

Track listing

Personnel

Credits adapted from liner notes.

Moonshake

David Callahan – vocals, sampler, guitar, etc.

Margaret Fiedler – vocals, sampler, guitar, synthesizer, cello, etc.

John Frenett – bass guitar

Mig Morland – drums, percussion

Additional musicians

Terry Edwards – trumpet, saxophones

Yvonne Lacey – flute

Production

Guy Fixsen – production, engineering

Moonshake – production

Artwork and design

K.o.F. (King of Fuck) – sleeve artwork and lettering