With La Luna, Daniel Romano’s Outfit has conjured a fully realized ode to the fertile subject of the moon and its influence on our human condition.
Daniel Romano has never struggled with redundancy and repetition. Every new release marks a new epoch and high point in his career. Such a shape-shifting musical talent as Romano’s is a rare and beautiful gift to us all and fortunately, he is willing to continue sharing his journey with us.
With La Luna, Romano and the Outfit (Julianna Riolino, Roddy Rosetti, David Nardi, Carson McHone, Ian Romano) have once again broken new ground and presented the world with a musical buffet: a fully realized ode to the fertile subject of the moon and its influence on our human condition. The thirty-three-minute opera, at once psychedelic, rocking, and folksy country waltz, is a tour de force divided into fourteen separate movements, each one building off of and speaking to the whole. The instrumentation is rich with horns and the voices of Riolino, Nardi, and McHone combine in pristine harmonies around Romano’s devotional musings.
Love, hate, war, and peace are oft-worn themes, and yet La Luna seamlessly weaves them unforced into a musical cloak that wholly encompasses the listener as the night sky does the moon. Elevated through lofty poetic subjecthood, the moon becomes a “Holy Deviser” —- an object of prayer, contemplation, and guiding parental entity from whom we seek clarifying comfort in our mortality. “We fear to disappear / To endlessly exist in emptiness / And so, we shape tomorrow like today,” and so we pray to that which seems eternal, but which — like us — has phases, shifts in appearance, and distance.
La Luna decimates the barriers between physical and spiritual. Material facts of human existence lie in lyrical counterpoint to the eternal nature of the soul and the metaphysical. We “tender fruit in the groves of war” can comprehend “True wisdom / In seeking what raise the waves as they roll,” ultimately recognizing that “Nothing is hidden from the eyes of the realized soul.”
If I sound a bit warped, it’s because I am. This record has shifted my perception of the world and the possibilities of modern rock music. Like many, I had listened to the excerpt “Genuine Light,” but now hearing it in concert and conversation with the whole of La Luna, I can confirm Romano and his Outfit have levelled up once again. In the end, one need only heed the advice on You’ve Changed Records’ site: “Turn the record over. Play again. Sing again. The moon rises.”
