The Moons

★★★★ Pocket Melodies COLORAMA. CD/DL/LP

Fourth album by psychedelic pop group helmed by Paul Weller band veteran.

Brazilian-born, Northampton-raised multi-instrumentalist Andy Crofts has helmed The Moons since 2006, the outfit’s recording career running parallel with his duties in Weller’s group. This follow-up to 2014’s oft trippy Mindwaves shows yet another leap in Crofts’ confidence as a writer and arranger, its defiantly English take on harmony rock, psychedelia and ’80s dreampop buttressed with Kinks-y rags and, in the exceptional soft-rocker Midnight, what sounds like a gigantic ‘lost’ AOR radio smash beamed from the late ’70s. The album’s lyrical sentiments can be quite endearing: check Sleep’s conceit that the world is a safer place when its leaders are asleep, or the plight of the man adrift in his spaceship in Tunnel Of Time (co-penned by Weller) unable to find a homely planet to land on. Abetted by the resonant ghosts of Abbey Road’s Studio 2 where it was created, Pocket

Melodies sees a genuine talent coming of age.