Monolith Cocktail Blog

Album Review/Words: Paolo Bardelli

Continuing with our collaboration with the leading Italian music publication Kalporz , the Monolith Cocktail shares reviews, interviews and other bits from our respective sites each month. Keep an eye out for future ‘synergy’ between our two great houses as we exchange posts.

This month Paolo Bardelli introduces us the music of Sam Cantor, aka Minor Moon.

Minor Moon ‘Tethers’
(Ruination Record Co./Whatever’s Clever, 2021)

Is Chicago still the centre of the world? There was a time when people wondered, and that was the time of Obama, who was based there: it seemed that the ferment united everything, from intellectuals to musicians. Sam Cantor from Chicago and his Minor Moon project, now in its third chapter, seems to be one of those who take the baton and ferry the city, or at least its sound, towards better times, in a quiet way. It is no longer the time to make waves: Minor Moon’s delicately psychedelic folk looks back to American rock but with grandmotherly care, that attention to substance which is typical of those who know what is important. But more than anything else she knows that it matters to have good songs to play with passion and protection.

Comparisons with better known names to show where this cosy Tethers is heading could be to compare it to an Iron & Wine with a few straws, or a Cass McCombs with fewer edges, but it would perhaps be ungenerous towards Sam Cantor who has reached a degree of autonomy that does not deserve to be “what he looks like”. Not least because it doesn’t sound like anyone but an idea that folk rock can still be done with grace and tradition that looks to the past to move forward.

If the songs were all like the opening ‘Ground’, a song that greets you like a friend would when you’re in trouble, or the cosmic folk tracks of ‘Under an Ocean of Holes’, we’d be talking about a near-masterpiece, but of course there’s a bit of everything: the pop of ‘Hey, Dark Ones’, the nocturnal ballad ‘Beyond The Light’, the deep States of ‘Was There Anything Else?’. All this is well amalgamated for the 36 minutes that are the time of an album from the past, the ones that used to be on the side of a C90.

But Minor Moon are just like a moon of the future, slyly looking at us with lunar times, not earthly ones.

71/100

(Paolo Bardelli)