2 out of 5

Label: Un Je-Nes-Sais-Quoi

Produced by: (?)

Man, I dunno, sometimes you can just look at a CD – look at the band name, the artwork, song titles – and even without other, perhaps more obvious context clues like a label that caters to a style, or heavy metal font… you can just look, and know: you know what it sounds like; you can predict the ebb and flow and approximately where its peaks might hit.

I want to be clear: Moonjellies’ Inner Anger, Feather is perfectly pleasant. It hits its marks; it’s polite; it lulls and sways appropriately, and perks up with some swagger here and there. But it is also very, very tepid, in the sense that it hardly has personality beyond its indie folk, psychedelia-lite, remember-the-Shins shimmery guitars and loping drums. I’m gonna assume there’s a layer of translation to the lyrics (this is a French label, but the songs are in English), but even if there’s not, it’s all pretty open-ended, vaguely relationshippy stuff; there’re harmonies and keys and strings; a general sadness with celebratory undertones – hope! – and at least one song where we bring out some distortion (Sunrise) and spotted swerves from melancholy into minor chord, stripped down tunes – which, surprise, that’s on concluder Black Cloud.

Perfectly pleasant. I’m sorry to be so judgey, because if you found Moonjellies before, say, The Beatles, or Oasis, or 00s Sub Pop, you’d be absolutely charmed by this. And the production makes the most of the music, enriching the instrumentation, giving the singing some warmth. But there’s simply no surprise – it is an album you can judge almost exactly by its cover.