Post-punk and the moon go together like peanut butter and jelly, or like Storrow Drive and a crumpled tractor trailer. There’s Echo & the Bunnymen’s spell of a hit, “The Killing Moon.” The cover of Sisters of Mercy’s 1987 album Floodland depicts the moon hanging over the ocean. And Robert Smith croons about various shades of it: Yellow (“One Hundred Years”) and blood red (“Endsong”).
Now we can add Otis Shanty’s “Echoes Of A Blue Moon” to that list of examples. The Somerville group released the single earlier this month (July 24) ahead of their forthcoming album Shadow Of Doubt, due out September 17 via Disposable America. The tune sounds as dreamy as its title, even if it stems from a bit of an emotional tussle.
“It came out of a nagging, longing for clarity, I’ve felt in every relationship,” says singer Sadye Bobbette. “Writing this song helped realize that something can feel so right, so beautiful, and for whatever reason there is some external force that prevents it from reaching its full potential, almost in a spiritual way.”
Bobbette creates her own lyrical push and pull from the jump, bridging a glimmer of awe over a blue moon — “Makes you wonder/If it feels right/Why don’t we do it all the time?” — with the inherent disappointment of the observation “Catch you standing there/At the corner of your indecision.” For peak New England post-punk effect, Otis Shanty recorded the tune at Big Nice Studio, a repurposed mill building in Lincoln, Rhode Island.
Tune in below, and pre-order cassette copies of Shadow Of Doubt.