TUNES // Al Riggs – Moon and America, The Great Dance

Post by Misha

You see footage of the moon landing sometimes, and it’s beautiful. Desolate, dangerous, lonely, unknown. But what I love to watch most is the footage of people watching the moon landing. When I think about the things that everyone has watched together in my lifetime it is mostly tragedies. But in the faces around the TV on the night of the moon landing, you can read the fairy tale of a nation coming together to celebrate, even if it is a celebration of an illusion – of owning something unownable.

This song orbits detachment, a kind of arms length tension hangs in the air along with the hunger for commonality, a moon landing to tie our identities together indelibly. A symbolic or possibly even imagined promise to gather around in the flickering light of the television. The longing is so palpable and made more so filtered through the brittleness of autotune. I’d like to take this opportunity to implore musicians never to listen to the Internet critics who disparage autotune. Autotune is a gift brought to us straight from the depths of untapped yearning.

Al Riggs is very good at telling stories. Their music often feels like an oral history of a world that very nearly exists, as if written entirely in moments stolen from dusk and dawn about things which are too ephemeral to exist outside of the half light. ‘Moon and America, The Great Dance’ is my favorite from their new album, Lavender Scare, a world built from these moments. Layers upon layers of tissuey pastels whispering and crumpling together in fragile harmony. Rainwater mixing with the aftermath of a drug store hair dye job. A million pairs of lonely eyes trained on the last sliver of the crescent moon.

Buy Lavender Scare here.