Dion Lunadon – Beyond Everything
Back with his sophomore solo record after five years finishing up with A Place To Bury Strangers, ex-D4 bassist and garage lifer Dion Lunadon is now impeccably placed on In The Red after first starting out with Agitated. And although Lunadon may be aiming for Beyond Everything with this release, these 11 tracks largely come from the same fuzzy, noisy – yet varied – playbook as his snappy debut, a couple of surprises included, not least the camp, 50s-style rock ‘n’ roll love song, “Goodbye Satan”, that lifts the curtain. A minimal blend of budget drum programmes, crunching bass and organ it comes across like Hunx and His Punx, fun in its own way but false promise of what’s to come.
Splitting the difference between catchy noise-pop and effervescent garage-punk, Everything Beyond – like its predecessor – is a little limited in resources and scope, but it’s DIY punk so it kinda should be. Raw second single “It’s The Truth” quickly injects some excitement with metallic guitar, sand-blasting static and the explosion of some real-kit muscle. Red-lining garage-thrash, throaty chugging and super-charged surf fill in the blanks elsewhere, the album closing with lead single, “Living And Dying With”, an unusual running order choice perhaps, but a stylistic and triumphant return to form, its wild proto-punk strutting contorting into a honky-tonk roller reminiscent of In The Red institution King Khan. With that mic-drop fresh in mind, Everything Beyond suddenly makes more sense – it’s little more than the sound of Lunadon getting his feet under the table within his new label. And he sounds very much at home.
Best track: “Living And Dying With”
~Beyond Everything is out June 10th via In The Red.~