Album Review: Moon 2 by Ava Luna

Ava Luna have always moved by rapidly and with an independent time signature, but Moon 2 is the band's most propulsive album and maybe their best. It follows 2015's clash-clang Infinite House, 2014's bluesy needy Electric Balloon, and a few years of shifting roles within the ensemble. Carlos Hernandez has leaned out of his leadership position; on hiatus are his commanding screams as well.

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Ava Luna's fifth studio album, Moon 2, features a slimmed-down lineup of Carlos Hernandez, Julian Fader, Becca Kauffman, Felicia Douglass, and Ethan Bassford. Besides continuing a trend toward more structured and, at least relatively speaking, more subdued material, it also sees Hernandez step back as frontman for their most democratic effort yet. Of note, Kauffman (aka Jennifer Vanilla) brought a newly acquired crate of '90s chant tapes made by women's lib groups to the sessions.

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Here on Moon 2, their fifth full-length, Ava Luna stretch to reinvent their core tenets — democratizing the songwriting process, embracing repetition and pop song structure, pushing electronic instrumentation and digital production to the center — to create something more transportive. Attempting to place their listeners under the beams of a new moon, they maintain familiar traits but deliver them in an adapted style: all the same matter and things and stuff, but with a newly governed, magnetic dynamism at play under the surface. A sort of a pop take on their more amorphous and elusive mode of play — songs are just as difficult to track, but more generously leave room for the repetition of phrases and the reprise of sections — Moon 2 finds a more welcoming, more enveloping, and more fantastic world than the garage-y atmospheres of past albums allowed.

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