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“The Killing Moon” – Echo & The Bunnymen
(Words/music: Pete de Freitas, Ian McCulloch, Les Pattinson, Will Sergeant, available on Ocean Rain, Sire 1984)

This August, Echo & the Bunnymen and Coldplay will perform on the same night at New York’s All Points West festival.  It seems appropriate because these two bands have a lot in common with each other. Specifically, both bands craft pop songs in a specific style – Coldplay sounds like a ballad-heavy Radiohead and Echo & The Bunnymen buffed out many of post-punk’s rough edges.  This earns both bands their fair share of detractors, leveling claims that the two are derivative or – even worse – boring.  Sure, neither band will go down in the books as daringly innovative, but I’m not sure that was either band’s goal.  Instead, these bands pour their energy into making their songs bigger and more lavish; to them, innovation means making a grander song.  Of course, this will turn some people off right away, but it’s at the expense of the songs.  Yes, both bands are a little over-the-top at times (and if you catch me in a weaker moment, I’d probably wonder out loud how these two are closing a major music festival), but their best songs deserve the deluxe treatment.  Even if their contemporaries did it better, both bands wrote some of the undeniably best songs of their eras.

The title of “The Killing Moon” suggests a much darker song.  Instead, it strives for a sort of dour beauty rather than gothic gloom.  The tinkling piano lines and guitar phrases echo slightly and sound slightly spooky, but overall they give the song a majestic feeling.  Even Ian McCulloch’s deep voice has a rich tone on this song.  The song (like the album’s cover) sounds cavernous, yet it’s not the kind of cave with the threat of monsters lurking in the darkness.  Instead, it’s sufficiently lit by torches that highlight the cave’s distinctive formations.  It’s a grand song that sounds like a beautiful secret hiding place rather than a source of terror.  Some might label this as false advertising, but hearing “The Killing Moon” should wash away any doubts.  Everything in the arrangement – from the brooding melody to the restrained use of synthesizer in the background – works to create this cavernous wonder.

More on Echo and the Bunnymen: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm