Are we both fading out
into the background of someone else’s photograph?
Moon Elevator‘s second EP, The Shadow That Follows You Home, finds the Melbourne trio exploring the twilight of post-punk romance with cinematic elegance. Photographer and songwriter Gareth Sobey, drummer Nigel Moyes, and synth specialist Stephanie Davis conjure atmospheres rich in emotional abstraction, shedding stark insight onto contemporary connections.
On In This City, Moyes introduces a steady, motorik pulse beneath windswept guitar layers, setting the stage for Sobey’s languorous, Verlaine-esque vocals. The lyrics sketch a twilight urban panorama, evoking Echo & The Bunnymen’s bleaker ventures with a dash of The Triffids’ dusky romanticism. The high contrast black and white video, directed by King & Sobey, channels the work of Anton Corbijn, showing the band playing onstage, juxtaposed with images of the city’s labyrinthine transit hubs.
Silver Screen ascends gently, guitars spiraling skyward over a foundation of ambient textures and rolling percussion. Here, Moon Elevator channels the spectral elegance of Talk Talk’s late-period cinematic flourishes. Tall Grass envelops listeners in Davis’s deep Moog bass currents, tangled in spirals of psychedelia and hypnotic rhythms recalling Radiohead’s experimental phases. Thunderstorm field recordings drift subtly, accentuating Sobey’s lyrical quest for escape amid layers of shimmering guitars and dizzying synthesizers.
Haunted Telephone, the closing number, plunges into depths favored by Slowdive and Melbourne stalwarts HTRK. Sobey sketches a stark emotional boundary: a line now severed; a ghost rendered silent. Rather than mourn loss, it celebrates the liberation of refusal: a psychic reset button pressed decisively, ending spectral disturbances. Moon Elevator summons a fever-dream vision in the video for the song, draping its disconnection in vivid symbolism and ceremony. Directed collaboratively by frontman Gareth Sobey and Melinda King, the video drifts through surreal scenes: tarot cards ominously drawn, televisions whispering quiet doom while a telephone sways abandoned, suspended by its cord. Faces linger, fixed in silent complicity. A call rings unanswered, simmering in Lynchian mysticism: cryptic, coded, and charged with elusive significance.
Tracked partially at Sobey’s home and partially at Head Gap Studios under Rohan Sforcina’s discerning production, The Shadow That Follows You Home holds poignant significance for the band: the record became one of the final works captured at the cherished Melbourne studio before it succumbed to flames. Mixing by Sforcina and mastering by Lachlan J Carrick ensure a precise clarity that emphasizes the EP’s spectral qualities.
The Shadow That Follows You Home poises itself delicately between revelation and restraint; a careful mediation on intimacy, isolation, and emotional clarity, shimmering quietly at the edge of silence.
Listen below, and order the EP here
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