11/19/2024

Dylan Moon’s Only the Blues Turns Five

A knell from Dylan Moon’s “Death Warmed,” in light of the recent five-year anniversary of Only the Blues.

At this juncture in his trajectory, Moon’s music, at its core, followed a folk tradition being extracted and explored by Alex G, Courtney Barnett , and others at the time. While the confessional application of those traditions are apparent Moon’s debut album, the songs here come as if through a fog, charting winding roads wherein lucidity and meaning become clear through feeling rather than precise detail. To Moon, obfuscation becomes its own kind of confession.

Recorded in bedrooms across Los Angeles and Boston, an intimate anxiety colors the album. Songs arrive ornately fashioned and bursting with ideas, feeling uniquely unwieldy and alive. This sense of motion and unplaceable time is mirrored in the video for “Death Warmed,” directed by Dylan himself.