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.