Only The Blues

Only the Blues is an introduction deferred, and it is the debut album by Dylan Moon. 

Moon studied electronic production and sound design at music school, and then moved to Los Angeles in hopes of working in the film industry. While simultaneously graduating from pop to psych to prog to beat-making, he returned to traditional songwriting on the west coast, working out his ideas over a pair of self-released EPs. He also stumbled upon an ancient drum machine with scratched contact points and seventy years spent under restless thumbs, finding a kind of sonic entropy in its past-futurist rhythm signals that serve as Only the Blues' spiritual center.

The album was recorded in Moon's bedrooms in L.A. and Boston, small spaces made more claustrophobic by the soundproofing he hammered into the doors and the bedding he leaned against the walls. A single soul, spinning away (and out) in a cramped room: It's a state of mind - and being - that Moon used his formal training to refine across Only the Blues. This is an album ornate with so many musical ideas to express that it teeters between ecstasy and anxiety. 

That anxious quality is also what makes Only the Blues endlessly captivating. Moonmoves quickly, courting the madcap at the centre of his songs and just as quickly retreating to the fray. Processed guitars appear for a measure and disappear. His voice, a brittle croon reaching reedy highs and bottoming out into throaty baritone, wears tape hiss like a scarf while gently interlocking instrumental figures go nude below. The drum machine melts into a puddle of reverb. 

Only the Blues uses obfuscation as a mode of confession, so long as we mean "confession" in the conventional sense. Moon is not hiding, but he is deliberately deciding: choosing how to be vulnerable, how to reveal, when to let go, when to move on. It's not the way we usually meet one another. Maybe it should be. 

Tracklisting 

1. Hope Dog 
2. Death Warmed 
3. Rosy 
4. Chimneys 
5. A Witch 
6. Analog
7. Blue Jean 
8. Collapse 
9.  Song For Jerry 
10. Interlude 
11. Lines 
12. Faraway Places 
13. Morning Limbo 
14. Mind Troubles