Guest musicians:
Jan Tomšic - Flute, Vocals on The Groove
Jaka Jarc - Backing Vocals on Rigg's Family Shot

From tiny Slovenia, which already breeds quite unique and highly interesting music by artists such as Laibach, Bibic, Bratko & The Madleys, NON FINIRe mai, etc., another band with great talent has emerged. Moonlight Sky is a progressive hard rock band, very very much in the format and style of late '60s bands such as first period Deep Purple, very early Jethro Tull, or Banks/Hackett duetting at the zenith of Genesis. Deep Purple is probably the best reference, because Moonlight Sky sounds sometimes exactly like the famous British hard rocking fellows, ante Gillan and the capillary excesses. So much in fact that it brought me nostalgia of my youth, listening to “Shades of Deep Purple’. In fact, I even decided to pick up the latter simply to check whether my memory was playing tricks to me, but not quite.... The recipe is there, the well balanced doses of blues and artsy rock without the sweeping operatic vocals, that is, in the Rod Evans days and before the big break.... Moonlight Sky is definitely a bright reincarnation of the early Deep Purple type of art rock, and does a very nice job at it. And after all, what color is a moonlight sky on the night of the New Moon?

Their 2006 eponymous release is a brew mostly made of bluesy rock numbers that venture sometimes into symphonic mode, without ever changing the world. There are nice instrumentals (e.g. Devet – osem), which feature an especially inventive guitarist, Miha Petric, who always doses his solos with exquisite taste and purity of sound, much like a Carlos Santana would do in another style. One track (“Rigg's Family Shot”) could easily fit on “This Was” or “Stand Up” without feeling out of place, and contains all the clichés of the blues rock genre, always well executed and tasteful. You want a little shot of Talkbox as dessert? You get it! As I was listening carefully and trying to get an overview of the album, one term was coming up constantly: “bluesy”. The band is really at its best in the blues rock style, and it really is the general direction of the album, from start (“Lunin svit”) to finish (“The Groove”). Of course, the Purple-ish organ does not hurt for that matter. “The Groove” ends the album with a juicy, hypersexual hypnotic blues a la “Hey Joe” (Deep Purple/Hendrix) crossed with “I Want You” (Beatles), but sung with a male form of Janis Joplin. Very well done, but a tad on the cheesy side. “Pluton” features nice spacey (surprised?) solo electric guitar once again, with pyrotechnics a little reminiscent of Crucis” Pino Marrone, but not quite there yet. But the best track is definitely “Ocean”. It goes through several moods; at times contemplative, moody, with ethereal guitar and chanting in the background, and then becomes majestic, with very crunchy and beautiful guitar soloing. What strikes the listener here is the steady restraint of emotions, the type of contained expression of which enduring classics of soaring majesty such as “Firth of Fifth” are made, for example.

“Moonlight Sky” as a debut album bears good promises. As such, it is too derivative to really find its niche yet. On the other hand, once the band starts to leave its models behind and finds its real voice, it has the unequivocal potential of a great symphonic progressive band.