This year, Tokyo’s Moscow Club have been balancing precariously between electronic goodness and cheesy gloop. They haven’t abandoned the indie-pop sound that grabbed some attention last year – see the lovely “Radio Vietnam” – but their 2012 output has relied heavily on synths and keyboards, the band conjuring up a spacey, 80’s new wave vibe that’s more outright pop than anything they’ve done before (if SoundCloud tags can be trusted, this is “nerdwave”). Plenty of other Japanese bands go down this same path too, armed with dated keyboard sounds and nostalgia – and the end results tend to be pretty bad, bands more concerned with capturing the sound of a specific era than making something that sounds good today. Moscow Club’s “And The Moon Be Still As Bright,” like a lot of the material they’ve put out this year, isn’t that different, but they manage to make it work somehow. Well, “somehow” is a bit misleading…this works because the singing sounds so great over the twinkling backdrop, the group’s vocalist unafraid to risk sounding human whereas so many others in Japan either try to play it cool or mask their vocals in Vocoder. “Fahrenheit 451” remains their high point in 2012, but “And The Moon” shows they know how to work this style just right. Listen below.
