The Yellow Moon Band – Travels Into Several Remote Nations Of The World

and Danny Hagan were already sharing their love of good music by founding Green Man Festival, but being behind the stage was not enough for them. They started a band nicely called It’s Jo and Danny, then went on to form The Yellow Moon Band with a couple of friends.

There is definitely something psychedelic about the name of the band, and psych is indeed one of the major trends of the album. Yet, the psych sound they offer seems to be severed from any notion of real mental experience; it is more a cultivated reminiscence than a truth coming from the heart. The four musicians obviously know what they are talking about when they display their influences, ranging from Zappa and Hendrix to Cymbient and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, but they ultimately fail at transforming this collection of sounds into a pattern that actually means something to modern listeners, something other than just ‘what a wonderful time they had in the ’70s’.

One has to acknowledge that these sympathetic riffs and these desperate drum solos are quite all right to dance to, and certainly it must be cool to see The Yellow Moon Band live, especially at a big Summer festival where you are too tired to really care about being elitist. Yet the Green Man is not Woodstock and the dominant ideology has changed. It’s not about liberation and revolution anymore, and the band’s music is quite telling in that regard: it’s nice but void; it purports to sound decadent but it’s too clean; it wants to be dark but it’s too numb; it’s swinging, but just as much as anything else.