Lune: The Band -- The Ship Sails On
Lune: The Band leverages alt-country punk for a stirring album of survival and perseverance
There's just something about twangy Midwestern punk that makes my blood run hot – hot enough to inspire me to start Adobe & Teardrops over a decade ago. Lune: The Band persist in that tradition, doggedly pursuing truth with rawness and grit that only comes from a near-spiritual sense of purpose.
The Ship Sails On serves as a sequel to 2014's The Ship is Sinking, a sour punk exploration with folk undertones. Sinking is an album to get obliterated to, a maelstrom of self-loathing and substance abuse with a spark, somewhere, of self-preservation.
"Little Light," the aggressively upbeat intro to Sails On, explains that impulse: perseverance in the face of childhood verbal and sexual abuse and the depression that still weighs lead singer Nathaniel South down. Yet the album focuses on what to do next: how to break vicious cycles and give the past its due when it runs up on you.
Lune set the stage with "Indiana," a skewering of toxic white masculinity and the Christofascism that we are all now learning the true extent of. "Tequila Sunset" brings us to the classic punk truisms of the beauty and liberatory power of rock'n'roll. Whether joyous or in pain, South's voice brims with arresting intensity – you can't look away.
"Queer" is a testament to that hard work of uncovering yourself: many of us know the work it takes to dig ourselves out of shame and social rejection, regardless of any other pressures we've faced to lie to ourselves. The song is cautiously hopeful, a farewell to the behaviors that hurt us.
Lune leave us with "Don't Give Up the Ship," a straightforward (but not graphic) narrative of South's experience. By the time we're left back on shore, we hold a newfound respect for the hardscrabble bar band: these aren't just drinking songs, they're confessions couched in a refusal to be dragged under the waves. Truth be told, this is the band I've been looking for for the last fifteen years: one that transmutes the aggression and masculinity of alt-country into a story for the rest of us.
