Luna’s Light Finally Dims

When Dean Wareham ’85 took the stage Friday night in front of a packed house downstairs at the Middle East, he carried himself like a man aware of his own accomplishments. He said a simple “Hello,” picked up his guitar and played with such attunement and precision that his instrument seemed to be just another part of his body. So began Luna’s final Cambridge show, more than 18 years into Wareham’s musical career.

Luna, the group formed and lead by Wareham, has been one of the bastions of Velvet Underground-influenced mid-tempo guitar pop throughout the ’90s and into our ’00s, releasing seven critically lauded albums. Yet despite this success, they will disband after their current tour in February.

“It just built up inside me. Seven is enough. Enough is enough,” said Wareham on the breakup. “It’s much different being in rock and roll at 41. Most bands that go on this long are millionaires. Breaking up R.E.M. would be like breaking up I.B.M.—too many people would lose their jobs. All the money gives them an incentive for the therapy. We don’t have that.”

None of this tension seemed to affect the performance. The set, like their latest album Rendezvous, opened with “Malibu Love Nest,” a song exemplary of the band’s recent tendency towards polished, upbeat, yet still clearly indie-minded tunes. Though the crowd seemed slightly upset at not hearing an old favorite, they were quickly quieted and then enthralled by the group’s mature songcraft and impeccable musicianship.

The set was arranged for the most part in reverse chronological order, frontloading their recent songs and leaving their early- and mid-90’s classics for the end.

“Each record is a reaction against the last,” he related of this year’s excellent release. “This one is simpler and quicker, like in the beginning. It’s the old rock cliché: the records were getting more and more complex, and then we went back to basics.”

This quest for a more live feel is reflected in Rendezvous to a point, with more straightforward rock songs taking precedence over the more languid shoegazer pieces of yore. But even if it is the most “live” Luna album, it’s still far from raw: the songs are still finely chiseled. One gets the feeling that by now the distinguished Wareham could hiccup out songs that most aspiring bands would kill to write.

Inserted into the initial salvo of tracks from Rendezvous and 2002’s Romantica was “Slide,” a throwback to the group’s first LP Lunapark. The crowd responded positively, especially to the lines “New England has the foliage / But I’m not goin’ back,” despite the fact that the lyrics are more dismissive than praising. The joy of hearing their region name-checked by one of its semi-prodigal sons outweighed the actual message, or perhaps all that could be made out way in the back of the club over the dense, effects-heavy guitars was the name of the locale and not the message attached.

The idea that Wareham isn’t a Bostonian anymore was emphasized when the band dove into “Going Home,” in which “home” is New York. As much as we would like to claim him, no one place can really call him its own: Wareham is a native New Zealander who moved to Australia and then to the Big Apple before coming to school here.

‘FOUR YEARS DOWN THE DRAIN’

Speaking of his Harvard experience, Wareham wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. “Harvard had absolutely no influence on my musical career.” Later he recanted slightly his initial position, relaying that working at WHRB exposed him to a lot of music that he otherwise would not have heard.

The former Quincy House social studies concentrator half-facetiously remarked that his time at Harvard was “four years down the drain,” remarking that his extracurricular activities prepared him for his line of work much more than his actual studies.

If for nothing else, Harvard was vital to his career in that all the members of his first major band, Galaxie 500, all attended the college, although the group didn’t form until after they had all graduated.

The now-canonized Galaxie 500 didn’t receive much press during their rather brief existence, perhaps because the label that released their three excellent LPs between 1988 and 1990, U.K. press Rough Trade, went bankrupt at almost the same time Wareham announced that he was quitting the group. This left all of Galaxie 500’s music, albums as well as performances, virtually impossible to find.

Despite their sudden disappearance from the landscape, their long-term importance has remained intact: the trademark sound of soaring, pedaled, yet restrained guitar and whining/majestic vocals over a solid foundation of simplistic drumming and basswork defined the style of the nth generation descendants of the Velvet Underground, and in turn helped to inspire the shoegaze and slowcore movements that were so fruitful in the early and mid ’90s. To this day they remain one of Boston’s most famous indie exports.

As the show went on, the movement from recent material towards older pieces was apparent. One key moment occurred during “Moon Palace” when Wareham broke into the high, yowling vocal style that has been conspicuously absent from their post-millennial output. It drew howls of approval from some of the more inebriated members of the crowd.

About this time the audience began to grasp that there was less than an hour between them and the last time they would see Luna. Cries of “Say it ain’t so, Dean!” shot stageward, leading Wareham to preface a song with an ironic reply of “Let the healing begin.”

Though he’s clearly the driving force behind the group, Wareham is hardly a tyrant. This is two-guitar music, and both guitarists, Wareham and Sean Eden, were given plentiful opportunity to shine throughout the set. Eden even stepped to the microphone for “Broken Chair,” revealing himself as a more than able vocalist while giving Wareham a chance to rest his uniquely nasal voice.

Many bands tote racks full of effects pedals onto the stage, but rarely are they justified. On Friday, they most certainly were: Luna manipulate sound like magicians, using all the tricks in their bag to make a single guitar track multiply and shapeshift until it’s palpable, filling the room with warm red sound.

The band closed the initial set with a thunderous extended rendition of “Black Postcards,” and the first encore with a similarly blissful version of the perfectly selected “Time to Quit,” which would have been a fitting end to the show.

However poetic it may have been, Luna was never a band about perfect climaxes, nor were they deaf to the crowd’s calls on Friday and so they returned for a second encore, this time playing “23 Minutes in Brussels.”

The tune (which incidentally shares a rhythm with the Velvet Underground’s monolithic and massively influential “Sister Ray”) came across as an averaging of the band’s entire output as well as input, merging both their old and new styles with those of their progenitors. By the end every eye was transfixed on Wareham: the past and the future were both on stage at once, and it was beautiful.