New Zealand musician Dion Lunadon (born Dion Palmer) has been a part of many bands over the past quarter-century, including early-21st Century garage rockers The D4 and NYC eardrum murderers A Place To Bury Strangers (APTBS), where he held down bass duties from 2010 until 2020. Lunadon wrote and recorded his second solo album, Beyond Everything, during a long stretch of creativity between 2017 and 2019 when, according to his own estimates, he penned “about 100 songs.” The ten songs he selected for this album cover a lot of dynamic space within the garage/psych-rock idiom, but with a consistently dark and disturbed vibe permeating throughout. Regardless of whether he’s playing a fiery rocker or a moody slow-burner, Lunadon always sounds like a sunglasses on at night kind of guy feeding off of a lineage of rock minimalism that includes The Stooges, Suicide, and The Jesus and Mary Chain, but with a harsher industrialized tone that isn’t too far off from his work with APTBS. Lunadon finds gold with this formula on the skittering “Screw Driver,” which successfully reworks The Jesus and Mary Chain’s sound circa-Automatic or Honey’s Dead for the chaotic environments of the 2020’s. Unfortunately, Lunadon’s voice is a liability, with vocals that are either frustratingly nondescript, or ill-fitting impressions of other singers, including Trent Reznor (“By My Side”), Fred Cole (“It’s The Truth”), and Iggy Pop (“Elastic Diagnostic”). Without a strong vocal identity to steer the ship, Beyond Everything’s appeal likely won’t go too far beyond fans of the groups that inspired the album, but I imagine that those folks (myself included) will find something within its ten tracks worth listening to.
Midnight To Six 