Eva Luna is the debut studio album by British band Moonshake. It was released through Too Pure in October 1992.
Blending elements of experimental rock, post-punk, dub, psychedelia, hip hop"Moonshake, Eva Luna Deluxe Edition" — review by Anthony D'Amico in Brainwashed, 10 March 2024 and noise rock (with an extensive use of sampling), Eva Luna is often identified as a key album of 1990s British post-rock"Here are 10 bands from the '90s you never heard and it's a damned shame" — article in Alternative Press, 20 July 2020 and sampledelia.
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.""Tone Glow 127: David Lance Callahan (Moonshake, The Wolfhounds)" — interview in Tone Glow, 26 February 2024 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: Eva Luna 1992-2022 — 30 years on" - article by Martin Gray in Louder than War, 24 October 2022
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."
Regarding his own contributions, Callahan has commented "I don't think it was didactic. It wasn't like lecturing people. I was trying to have fun and be creative with what was around me, and we weren't living in the best of situations, really. There was no money and places were kind of squalid. It's what you do to be in a band a lot of the time. But it was just reflecting... the city of London seemed to be decaying."
Callahan recalls the band as having been "well prepared" for the Eva Luna recording sessions, following extensive rehearsing (with co-producer/engineer Guy Fixsen already involved for advice), but that they'd also embraced opportunities to improve the material further while in studio. "One song in particular, "Wanderlust", was mostly Margaret's music but with my bassline and my singing over the top. We wanted that one more open ended so we could experiment with it in the studio. But for a lot of it, you'd play these songs live, take them in the studio, and realize some parts weren't working. You'd have to think on your feet... We would make sure that we got good live drum takes for a start. There would be some click tracks sometimes and there would be a bit of cut and pasting, but you really couldn't do a lot of that then... Dropping someone in to continue a take was about the best you could do at the time. So those are live drums, most of them. One or two are loops off a sampler, but we tried to confuse it so you wouldn't know which was live and which was a sample."
"Trying to get all those different noisy guitars to sound separate from each other, but somehow still the same, was a challenge. It was a lot of fun. I remember sending some demos to Terry Edwards — he played the horns on it — and he came in and I just said to him, "Can you do some kind of free jazz on bits of it? And can you do an Ennio Morricone trumpet thing on the third verse?" I just thought he'd do something kind of token, but he came and did these amazing horn parts, and it just really lifts the whole song... [It's] a noisy, Stooges-inspired song... but it just takes it so much further, almost into jazz. I'm just really happy with the way that came out. It was such fun to hear someone doing such good parts on your songs. I couldn't recommend it more, to farm it out to people like Terry."
Eva Luna ultimately satisfied both Fiedler and Callahan as a record. Callahan: "We knew we'd done something really good... We thought the Secondhand Clothes EP and [Eva Luna] had everything the band should be about on it. It had everything. We certainly thought we'd done something that was true to us that would either be ignored for being too out there or would make an impression. And, fortunately, it made an impression. We wanted it to be both weird and have songs. We wanted it to have an upside-down kind of layering. It needed to have big bass and drums, like some dub or funk records, but we also wanted to find ways to incorporate the samples in a way that didn't sound like they were sellotaped on, like so many other bands. We wanted it to be completely enmeshed in the songs and the music. And I think we succeeded with that."
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.Eva Luna reissue page @ Beggars Arkive 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."Various Artists: BBC Radio Sessions, Vol. 1" @ Beggars Arkive
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),"1992 — The Loved Albums" — article in New Musical Express, 19/26 December 1992, p.57 with the EP "Secondhand Clothes" being voted the 28th best single of the year. (as retained on www.rocklistmusic.co.uk)