It’s been an unusually long journey for Jack Colleran from the time he first appeared as Mmoths to now.
As he tells Jim Carroll in the Irish Times today, it’s been five years, some waiting around included.
When the Newbridge kid first arrived, his music’s central appeal was that it was a naive, warm-hearted and relatively unburdened by expectation, exemplified by tracks like ‘Heart’ and ‘Summer’.
The attention gave him opportunity in music, to the detriment of his Leaving Cert, but it also gave him time to develop. At age 22, debut album Luneworks is the result of that maturity and exploration.
What that translates to is an album that is an entirely different prospect and of a different sonic palette than those early forays into electronic music. The twelve tracks on Luneworks are infinitely more textured and experimental, sharing kinship with producers on Tri Angle Records – The Haxan Cloak, Forest Swords and Holy Other among them.
Dispensing with a pop-fronted vocal, many of the songs feature Colleran’s wordless falsetto treated and given new properties as an instrument shrouded in atmosphere, enveloped by production texture. Piano-style chords bring focus as on the warm ‘Everything In its Right Place’-style ‘Deu’. ‘Para Polaris’ is an percussive take on MBV-style ambience, the words on ‘Eva’ are buried within the production, both warm and noisey, with Colleran sounding close to Foals’ Yannis Philippakis.
Elsewhere, sustained synths allow sparkling piano to linger, ‘Lucid’ recalls Jon Hopkins in style while ‘1709’ adds a fresh rhythmic side.
Luneworks, as the title suggests is far from those early forays into pop-fronted electronica, this is nocturnal experimentalism to get lost in. It leaves the sense of a musician is still at the start of a longer path.
Buy on iTunes.
