Phantom Dog Beneath The Moon – The Statue of the Hunter is Lost at Sea
Rusted Rail – March 31, 2017
Rusted Rail is proud to announce the release of “The Statue of The Hunter is Lost at Sea“, the third album by Phantom Dog Beneath The Moon. This album represents Phantom Dog’s first new material since 2010’s critically-acclaimed “The Trees, The Sea in a Lunar Stream”. Scratching an almost seven-year itch, the duo of Aaron Hurley and Scott McLaughlin have arguably defined a new form of musical struggle the “difficult third album” syndrome. It’s a battle they have won, and it was worth the wait. This nine-track album finds Phantom Dog Beneath The Moon exploring sonic territory inhabited by rivers, snowy graveyard trees and dark nights of the soul. These velvet lullabies meld avant-folk moves with a contemporary composition sensibility, suggesting hazy transmissions over a fog-shrouded lake, wading in the same brackish waters as Bark Psychosis and latter-era Talk Talk.
Phantom Dog Beneath The Moon have delivered a selection of songs so intimate it sometimes feels like eavesdropping on a late night conversation, as the duo and their collaborators delve into impressionistic interludes and glimmering nocturnal musings, with Hurley’s high, plaintive voice floating atop a shimmering cloud of haunting drones and lifted by transcendent codas. Along the way there are traces of rural psychedelia with one eye on the sky, as the album veers from misty acoustic confessionals to full-on shoegaze blowouts – this is the sound of a band at peak performance. Shindig Magazine had to invent a new genre to describe their previous album – they called it “Folk-Gaze” – and it is this confluence of songs straddling sonic space somewhere between handmade and high-fidelity, between late night and the break of dawn, that is the high watermark of “The Statue of The Hunter is Lost at Sea”.