It’s virtually inconceivable to maintain monitor of Daniel Romano. When he’s not publishing collections of poetry or artwork, the Ontario musician is both recording solo, producing others (most just lately Carson McHone’s Nonetheless Life) or creating ambient epics below the guise of varianza. To name him prolific feels reductive. In 2020 alone, grounded by the pandemic, he launched no fewer than eight albums, both solo or fronting Daniel Romano’s Outfit, together with a whole reimagining of Bob Dylan’s Infidels.
La Luna could be his most formidable venture thus far. A celestial music cycle in 14 chapters, served in two prolonged components, it’s a contemporary psychedelic musical that seeks to handle the large stuff: spirituality, God, creation, future and the like. The music, lyrics and preparations are all Romano’s, although his Outfit – mainly McHone, Julianna Riolino, Roddy Rosetti, David Nardi and brother Ian Romano – helps carry them to life in expansive, polyphonic element. It’s wealthy in brass, orchestral strings and massed harmonies, with Romano sharing vocal turns with others.
The opening part, “Real Gentle”, is a micro rock opera with shades of Rufus Wainwright and Queen, the choir singing again to Romano at his personal urging: “Love is all actuality”. And because it strikes into one thing funkier and extra trippy, McHone and Riolino commerce verses on what looks like some neo-Aquarian dream, rising into an ecstatic refrain that hails divine conception. The seek for enlightenment continues, morphing by nation and chamber-folk, as Romano reaches into the heavens: “Nothing is hidden from the eyes of the realised soul”.
Thematically, issues aren’t any much less weighty or bewildering on the 15-minute “Half 2”. Strings billow and fall as we’re launched to “the cosmic phantasm of time”. A quieter passage, largely simply piano and violin, is swept apart by voluminous psych-pop harmonies and horns, ending in a grand finale that wrestles summary notions of affection, demise and common gentle. An accompanying full-length movie, starring Julie Doiron within the lead position, is due this autumn. Let’s hope it’s simply as weirdly exhilarating.
