Winding up another of what guitarist Sean Eden called a “micro-tour,” Luna returned to the Birchmere Music Hall in Alexandria, VA, last week, opening with the glasslike instrumental strains that eventually aligned into John Barry’s theme from Midnight Cowboy.
It set the stage for a certain kind of twangy urban sophistication and intrigue that has been the hallmark of the Luna sound since it began out of the ashes of Galaxie 500. Standard-bearers of a certain New York guitar rock—artsy and angular, alternately poetic and driving—Luna extended the traditions of the Velvet Underground and Television with inventive music (that sometimes used some of the musicians from those bands on their string of 1990s albums).
Trapped in the confines of critical acclaim and commercial indifference, they disbanded in 2005, only to delight fans by reuniting a decade later with a seeming shrug. Since then, they’ve toured in these occasional week-long bursts of dates, releasing just one Luna studio recording since the reboot—a half-instrumental, half-cover album in 2017.
Through it all, there have been releases of different configurations, mostly from frontman Dean Wareham (whose latest only came out last month). And there have been duo works with his wife and Luna bassist Britta Phillips—all of which were ignored in the live show. More connected to the present, Luna released three live albums in 2022, covering recordings from 30 years earlier. They had pulled that trick only the night before, in Philadelphia, of the entire Bewitched, for no announced reason.
In Alexandria, as in the other shows in New York this time out, it’s been a mix of Luna songs and a few covers, approaching the past not as exacting curators, but using the old songs as a springboard from which to expand and explore anew. In that, the opening “Midnight Cowboy” led to “Tracy, I Love You” from Pup Tent, and onto the first of five songs from Bewitched, perhaps because it was fresh on their mind.
They had only planned to do four of its tracks for the Birchmere, but someone sent up a note late in the set, saying that the fondest wish of a young fan at her first rock concert was to hear “Tiger Lily.” Not only did they play it to the room’s approval, but they also each described their own first live-show experiences in a revealing moment (for Wareham, for example, it was Leo Sayer in Central Park).
The other change in their set list was when they moved their disarmingly quiet, very brief cover of The Clash’s “I’m So Bored With the U.S.A.” from a show opener to something six songs in, between “Beggar’s Bliss” and “I Can’t Wait.” Despite being set in a dreamy, slower milieu, the lyrics of the nearly half-century-old Clash song rang true about “Yankee soldiers” and all the rest.
Wareham, long, lanky, and distinguishedly disheveled like a beardless Abe Lincoln, sang most of the songs in his soft yowl, trading guitar dynamically with Eden, who’d conjure surf and Bill Frissell-style tones from his guitar. Eden sang just one song, “Still at Home,” as did Phillips, clearly the best singer in the group, lending her voice to The Cars’ plaintive “Drive” over an electronic bed, as she did on her solo album, Luck or Magic, a decade ago.
Amid other covers, they did a terrific job on Lou Reed’s 1984 “New Sensations” but omitted a Television classic that had been part of their set, “Marquee Moon.” Still, the same kind of ever-evolving guitar interplay came, though, in the deliriously delicious final song of the night—and tour—“23 Minutes in Brussels.”
The evening was opened by the overly ambitious New Yorker Jeffrey Lewis, who had an array of clever songs, some illustrated with his own cartoon slide shows. Some songs went on for a long time just because he had so many good rhymes to display. With a merch table filled with his own self-drawn comic books, he had a lot going on.
