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Tour Dates
Dec 07 Chicago, IL - Metro
Dec 08 Detroit, MI - El Club Dec 09 Toronto, ON - The Opera House Dec 10 Montreal, QC - S.A.T. Dec 11 Boston, MA - The Sinclair Read More
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It’s not an instrument you normally see on a stage: A metal garbage can, dented and upside down. Usually it’s a prop in a movie when someone needs something to kick after getting dumped by a girlfriend or losing a big bet on the Super Bowl. Maybe Luis Vasquez of The Soft Moon had some things to work out.
Nuovo Testamento started off the evening with a set of Italo-Disco and 80’s synth pop songs.The band is comprised of L.A. based Chelsey Crowley on vocals and Andrea Mantione and Giacomo Zatti based in Boglogna, Italy on synths and percussion. Their set kept everyone swaying and moving to the propulsive beat from another era, starting with “Michelle Michelle” from their 2021 debut album New Earth. They even featured the song “Heatbeat” from their upcoming album Love Lines before finishing the set with “Electricity” and “The Searcher”.
Vasquez’s The Soft Moon started off his set with a different energy. Where Nuovo Testamento’s sound was crafted in the Italian discotheques meant to move and make you feel like moving, Vasquez’s Darkwave sound is more complex. Or as he states of his latest album Exister: “The whole point of this record was to share every emotion that I feel.”
Born in L.A., Vasquez started writing music at age 12, playing in his first band by 15, then an interesting turn. After his second album Zeros, he moved to Venice and then Berlin where he lived and recorded until the pandemic. He then packed up again and moved to the middle of the Mojave Desert. The reason to move? If there was going to be a lockdown, he needed to find a place where no one would mind him playing as loud as he wanted.
In the New Testament (Nuovo Testamento) Jesus moved into the desert to confront Satan and all his temptations. In Joshua Tree, CA, Vasquez worked through his emotions when recording Exister. You would think that that angst and rage would make for an insufferable performance, but Vasquez’s always made sure to keep the evening moving and the crowd dancing as he moved from the guitar to the Moog to percussion that at times involved playing the bongos.
Throughout the evening Vasquez’s music moved from the Berlin Discotheques to English New Wave to Techno and Industrial, speeding the beat up even more to where he almost pushed his Moog off its axis. And when he set aside the bongos during the kinetic “Want” from his self-titled debut album, it was only then that he moved to the metal trashcan to finish the drum solo.
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Soft Moon at Fine Line Music Cafe, Minneapolis (06 Dec 2022) |
| dave ♥ weheartmusic.com ♥ twitter.com |
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