Moonrisers

Moonrisers – Harsh & Exciting

Easy Eye Sound EES-042 [2025]
Circle Of The Seasons – Muddy Shores – All Your Hiding – Run Up Time – I Came Here To Be Alone – Further Down – Only The Lull I Like – Lift Him Up / Mother’s Last Word – Harsh And Exciting – Start On Foot

Harsh & Exciting is the debut album by Moonrisers, a band from Detroit, formed by Libby DeCamp (guitar) and Adam Schreiber (drums and percussion).
Produced by Dan Auerbach, it was recorded at the Honky Chateau, a century-old house (like some of the instruments used by the duo) located in Nashville which also hosted Early James for the recording of Medium Raw. In this propitious and historically rich setting, the producer created the ideal conditions to capture the essence and spirit of the band on record without distorting them.
Alongside the duo, a few guests complete the lineup. On nine of the ten tracks, we find Mike Rojas (who has played on nearly all of the label’s releases in recent years) on Hammond organ and vibraphone. The other musicians are Chris Scruggs (BR5-49, Marty Stuart) on pedal steel guitar and baritone guitar, bluegrass musician Tim O’Brien on mandolin, and Tom Bukovac on guitar. The album features only one cover, a medley of Lift Him Up and Mother’s Last Word, two 1928 pieces by gospel singer Washington Phillips.
Moonrisers’ music isn’t about virtuosity, showmanship, or any kind of sterile display of expertise aimed at wowing the listeners and leaving them speechless. Instead, using a blend of wobbly Appalachian folk and limping rural blues mixed with intricated drums patterns, the band takes the opposite direction to create a piece of intimate music that slowly unfolds, developing moods and textures. The duo and their guests seem to play with the air and the space between the notes to better envelop the listener, leading them to become a key element in the process. It’s the alchemy between the music emitted and the music received that brings the whole thing to life.
This music has a strong evocative power, creating a gallery of images of landscapes and nature. One thinks of certain film soundtracks. The spirit of Ry Cooder’s scores for Southern Comfort and Paris-Texas, or what John Lurie and Neil Young did for Jim Jarmusch movies is not so far away. Moonrisers create music for an invisible film inviting you to take charge of the visualization. But Harsh & Exciting goes beyond the simple musical reference. The listener often seems to be in the presence of a musical equivalent of what a walk with John Muir could have been or a form of musical transcendentalism. The band’s music, through its apparent simplicity, achieves a timeless and universal dimension. As a result, Harsh & Exciting sounds like a magnificent ode to Nature. Isn’t the album title taken from a verse in Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese?
If I weren’t afraid of using a word that is too often (and moreover poorly) used that it has almost lost its meaning, I would say that Moonrisers album is a form of poetry, a form so pure that it doesn’t need words.