Half Moon Run - Sun Leads Me On

Take random snapshots of Montreal four-piece Half Moon Run’s second album ‘Sun Leads Me On’, and it resembles flicking through a playlist of separate acts. Opener ‘Warmest Regards’ is a post-sunset, round the campfire number, ‘Hands in the Garden’ operates in the hands of melancholic road trippers, and the revved up ‘Turn Your Love’ switches things up several gears. Threads run throughout these songs, but by and large it could easily be perceived as a band suffering an identity crisis.

That’s a fair judgement going by multi-instrumentalist Dylan Phillips’ recent assertions that ‘Sun Leads Me On’’s title refers to their journey of being nudged, bit-by-bit, towards the finish line. Phillips has said the band felt like they were “underwater”, forced to power through. It’s second album syndrome in a nutshell, but fortunately Half Moon Run have gone beyond mere survival.

‘Turn Your Love’ is less the sound of self-acceptance, more of a band embracing their new identity. It’s a thousand miles from anything else on the record - especially the lightly-toned trio of ‘Everybody Wants’, ‘Throes’ and the barnstorming ‘Devil May Care’ - and a sudden jolt of life in a record that requires it. “I don’t feel the strongest singing my own songs / And I used to, baby” they chant, and it’s one of several self-admissions of nagging doubt circuiting around ‘Sun Leads Me On’.

When they get past their demons, Half Moon Run sit somewhere between accomplished musicians and potential game-changers. Too often they settle into a default mode, rarely hitting the melodic highs of ‘It Works Itself Out’ or the enraged bruiser ‘Consider Yourself’. But that’s an acceptable consequence for a group grappling with their own sense of self, and it’s rare to hear a band doing this so openly.