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Download the new single October 18th

Aerial Ballet HQ

Terriers

Sewingneedle

Lamp

Nathan Christensen

Facebook



October 25th

Tonic Room

American Babies (NY)

Young Hines

Facebook



October 30th

Quenchers - Phantom Phest

MOONER as WARREN ZEVON

Vaudevileins as Guns N' Roses

Doctor Pyramid as Bad Company

Facebook Click Ryan to buy, buy, buy! Bandcamp moonerband.com Facebook Twitter Email YouTube Mooner sub-Reddit OCTOBER 2013 NEWSLETTER Welcome to the great, late month of October.



Mooner has something for you...



that's right, under that sheet over there...



next to the furnace...



yes, in the corner there...



closer...



closer....

Your terrified screams resound into the Void while it blissfully whispers:



"Mooner will be playing a whole set of Warren Zevon songs on Wednesday, October 30th at Quenchers (2401 N Western) as a part of the first annual Phantom Phest."



Warren has been hugely influential on me since high school and Mooner has been known to feel very full of itself for loudly playing one of his more profane songs in the quadrangle of an unnamed Christian college. I'm beyond excited for this show. If anyone has any ideas for cheap costumes, email the band at moonerband@gmail.com. My wife suggested cowboys.



Vaudevileins as Guns N' Roses and Doctor Pyramid as Bad Company join us. Be sure to stay for these guys. Would you like us to just shut up and play the hits? Thanks to Chicago's ultimate promotion group, Harmonica Dunn, we'll be sharing the bill with New York's American Babies and Chicago's Young Hines on October 25th. It's been a while since we've been crammed into the back corner of the Tonic Room, distracted by the weird painting on the stage wall. Please come out and welcome us back. We're playing new songs that we're very shaky/excited about!



Here's the Facebook event. Finally, Danny Cohen of the excellent Chicago micro-label Aerial Ballet and pop band Terriers has invited us to play in the first installment of a monthly songwriter series on October 18th. This will be an all-acoustic apartment show so get there before it fills up. It's free and features Aerial Ballet labelmates sewingneedle, Terriers and Nathan Christensen. I am pretty sure we'll be covering "The Christian Life", by the Louvin Brothers, in the style of The Byrds. Also, I'll be wearing my awesome new Killing Joke tee. Also, THERE'S FOOD.



Here's the Facebook event. COOL MONTH FOR A MOONER:

A RECAP What else happened? Our debut show at the Hideout with Panoramic and True went off without a hitch. To you non-Chicagoans, the Hideout is something of considerable lore in Midwest indie rock circles. It's a place known for it's outrageously hospitable owners, homegrown, eclectic bills, good door deals and quality sound engineers. It's in a house built in the 19th century and sits next to a parking lot full of garbage trucks. It positively reeks of old school hospitality. Adam and Taylor have played the Hideout before but Steve, John and I never had. I was positively ecstatic to discover the following: What the legendary Hideout looks like from the stage (the same, but different) what's behind the mysterious door that reads: PRIVATE (more doors) what the undoubtedly posh upstairs greenroom is like (see picture below) if the staff really are as nice as everyone says (they are) if we somehow sound better simply by gracing the same stage as the Detholz!, Bobby Conn and obscure Wilco side project The Kaysettes (no). Needless to say, it was a historic evening and hopefully only the first of many visits to the stage. Desecrating the Throne in the Throne Room Hard to complain about the last two months. We played a lusted after venue, booked a bunch of shows, began work on new music and just wrapped up a Rooftop Session (look for that in a couple months). And we came out with $100 profit. That's two and a half hours recording time at Kingsize! It was the best of times for a baby band in Chicago. Don't forget: Zevon on the 30th.



-Lee Enter Audio Adrenaline. The 1990s are well known as a period in which major labels had an insatiable blood lust for anything "alternative." We got our Nirvana and our Mudhoney but we also got weirdos like Live, Temple of the Dog and a colorful host of bizarre variations on the "alternative" theme. Alternative Nation was exploding and riding on it's coat tails was the Christian music industry, benefiting from the same unstoppable, decade long boom. The worship music industry produced the bulk of it's lasting hits during this period (the history of Christian rock music is complicated, fascinating and impossible to unpack in this column--those looking for an entry point to this singular genre should begin here, here and DEFINITELY here.) If you've been to a non-denominational church in the last 10 to 15 years, chances are you've seen a trademark on some PowerPoint slides reading "ForeFront Records, 1997". ForeFront Records is one of the most influential Christian labels of all time and in '97 Audio Adrenaline was one of it's top artists. Here's some words from Lee on late 90s Christian post-grunge pop act Audio Adrenaline and their album Some Kind of Zombie.



Everyone get saved for Mooner Record Club Vol. 5! "But I'm dead to sin like

some kind of zombie." Sometimes you don't get to choose the music you love or hate. You're five years old and your grandma is babysitting and she can't get enough of "What's New Pussycat?" You find yourself, twenty years later, experiencing a compulsive, shameful twinge of happiness at the song's opening timpani hits. You're transported back to your grandma's kitchen, where she is making grilled cheese. Or you're taking a road trip to New York. "Surrender" starts playing on the radio near the state border and the whole car has a collective moment of rock n' roll zen. As soon as the chorus hits, a semi-truck clips your driver side and sends your car into a tailspin on the highway. When the car stabilizes, the song is still playing loud, though you're too stunned and upset to notice.



An obnoxious novelty song that causes most people irritation brings you nostalgic ecstasy or a classic rock anthem that is beloved by millions makes you want to pull over to the side of the road and breathe into a paper bag. Real experiences can become chained to music in a way that isn't always, uh... appropriate.

So it goes for me and Audio Adrenaline's Some Kind of Zombie. After scoring a minor crossover hit with 1993's "Big, Big House"--in which front man and chief lyricist Mark Stuart puts heaven in terms of MTV's Cribs--Audio Adrenaline landed on the Christian rock map. By 1997, the rapidly changing appetites of young audiences forced an overhaul of the band's sound. Some Kind of Zombie displayed their mutation from Spin Doctors-aping festival veterans into abstract, studio-mongering aggro-evangelists. They were firmly pro-Jesus but with a knack for Marshall stacks, dissonance and general "alternativeness."



I didn't find the band until their first greatest hits collection, 2001's Hit Parade. My parents picked it up from a Christian bookstore while indiscriminately gathering listening material for our 5-day, 2,000 mile move from Bartlett, IL to Portland, OR. As is the case with many 12 year olds forced into a move across the country, I experienced my first taste of capital-A Angst. Some Kind of Zombie had an edge just sharp enough to cut through my gathering rage while remaining Focus on the Family approved (One year later, I would take my dull edged rock without the Focus on the Family approval by ordering Rammstein's Mutter on German import). I got a Walkman and lived inside the album--particularly the title track--for months, while trapped in my grandmother's spare room, waiting for my dad to find us a house. Audio Adrenaline - Some Kind of Zombie This was probably the first time I spent any considerable time with one record. I loved everything about it. The acoustic ballad breakdown, the spoken word breakdown, the angry guitar solo breakdown, etc. Then there are the vague, Christian-but-could-be-about-anything lyrics. Ostensibly, they center around the common Evangelical theme of rebirth in which the pious individual dies to his old life and is born into a new life, impervious to the consequences of sin. In a weird expression of this theme, Mark Linkus is transformed into a God-fearing, zombified superdrone ("I'm dead to sin / like some kind of zombie"). On one hand, to a horror film loving 12 year old, this is awesome: dragging my decrepit body to church and shocking the congregation with my piety made horrifically incarnate. On the other hand, it's not really an apt analogy. Zombies aren't controlled remotely by a puppetmaster like God. They're driven by their unholy hunger for flesh. In George A. Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD, they're the violent embodiment of the selfish, consumerist American public, which, depending on your point of view, is not a very Christian-friendly portrayal.



It's not a great song. It's cheesy, a little shallow and it stumbles over itself to get to the edgy central image of a Christian zombie. That image, though--accompanied with Johnny Greenwood-aping guitars--was enough for 12 year old me to get amped on Audio Adrenaline. I don't know what the song has explicitly to do with me being angry about moving to Oregon and I'm not sure that I can know. "This song is about the amazing, miraculous power of Jesus Christ.'" I'm also not entirely sure how such an important musical experience has factored into my own music making today. I think it may have kicked off my disdain for highly referential, irony-laden rock and roll. The likes of Pavement and other bands of the time that saw rock and roll as an inert body to be mocked have never caught on. If someone is going to make cultural or rock and roll references, it's going to be transparent and genuine, damn it. Unlike their secular counterparts, Audio Adrenaline had no intention of breaking stuff or raging against the machine. Their goal was to save souls and their chosen medium was alternative rock. Billy Graham made the gospel an event fit for sports stadiums and Audio Adrenaline made it rock. There's a certain endearment that accompanies the lack of irony and trend co-opting that evangelists often exhibit. That makes it hard to hate on this song too hard. It IS a bad song, but it spoke to me at a very fragile time and so I can't really help but love it. Like some kind of zombie, it lulls me into a comfortably nostalgic state. Kind of sickening.



-Lee

