Midnight Special

Somewhere in the US, and the UK too, the Hype Machine is cranking into high gear. It's a machine that never really stops; it's probably the closest we'll ever get to a perpetual motion machine – just keeps on going, regardless of what it's spitting out, which is certainly not the point. The point is that it's working. That's all.

Occasionally, it'll regurgitate something decent though, something that doesn't conform to all the norms that've come before it, and Canadians Half Moon Run seem to fit easily into that category. In fact, they barely seem aware that various hipster rags have begun to sing their praises with an almost desperate need to find the 'next big thing'. To them, it's merely a bonus.

“We didn't really set our sights that high, we were just playing music because it felt good,” muses multi-instrumentalist Connor Molander. “And so one thing after another, things just keep getting better and better, it's amazing.”

It's been the band's debut release, the Dark Eyes LP (released in Canada over a year ago, but locally only this month) that's set the tongues a-wagging, but we're getting ahead of ourselves, so we'll loop back in a bit.

For those who came in late – “We formed three years ago, initially there were five of us in the band,” explains Molander, who now makes up a third of Half Moon Run, along with vocalist Devon Portielje and fellow multi-instrumentalist Dylan Phillips. “We all just jammed one day in Montreal and the chemistry was really good – we wanted to pursue it right away. So now there are just three of us, for other reasons… so it was really obvious right from the beginning that we were gonna give it a shot.”

Molander, Portielje and Phillips, almost from the word go, began to build what is now being lauded, this amalgamation of sounds which could just as easily fit under the roots umbrella, the rock umbrella, perhaps even electronica – it's certainly not your run-of-the-mill sound.

“Well that was just part of the chemistry, when we all came together, the sound kinda came together all at once really easily,” says Molander. “It was never really difficult to have that musical cohesion, we were [quite] lucky for sure.” Lucky indeed – more often than not, when a group of musicians from vastly different musical backgrounds come together, it's hard not to bring in all the influence and overload the whole thing. Not so here it seems.

“Absolutely,” Molander concurs. “I can't really say anything more than we've been really lucky. If it'd been a struggle, that would have been way more difficult.  And we're changing all the time – that was our first real go at it, we were learning how to record as we were going [as well]. We're looking forward to doing the second album, we've got a stronger footing now.”

For Half Moon Run, the second album is high on the agenda, writing has begun, and it's with an eye on the future that we find the band now. However, that sound they've created together was first shown up on Dark Eyes, and it's a solid unit, melding these myriad sounds together in a way which definitely sets them on their own path.

“We had no premeditated idea of what we wanted to come up with, it was just every time you got the feeling the song was really working, then you knew you were doing it right,” Molander says of Dark Eyes. “That feeling was what we were chasing the whole time.”  Hyped or not, Half Moon Run are doing it their way.