Moon Taxi
An irrepressibly modern shimmer gleams from Cabaret (released February 7), the new album from Nashville’s Moon Taxi. With this set these surefire, festival tested live dynamos have discovered their studio voice, a sound as intense and multihued as their concert presence, a song cycle where the entire band continually goes for it with all their might, impassioned singing bouncing above ringing guitars and a dense, hypnotic rhythm bed as the music rushes ever-forward. Timidity simply doesn’t exist in the Moon Taxi of 2012, whose earlier work had more classic rock and jam band leanings but now rolls in the same lane as Cold War Kids, Motopony, Lake Trout and post-Achtung Baby U2. Their road experiences still figure in lyrically with several cuts capturing the spinning abandon of late nights where one needs an extra pack of smokes and full flask because they know in their bones they’ll be greeting the sunrise. While still very much a rock band, this album showcases Moon Taxi’s beat savvy and dance/hip-hop awareness in a really fluid manner. Put another way, this sucker moves seductively, an inducement to twirl and smile even as it asks tangled questions and pokes at the cosmos with smiling curiosity.
Cabaret marks a new, exciting chapter for this tenaciously evolutionary unit, so we fired off DI’s signature questionnaire set to the band see what they had to say to our inquiries.
