First time around Ian Moore was a long-haired, guit-slinging Austin hotshot who toured with Joe Ely’s band and, as a solo artist, made roots records for Capricorn for much of the ’90s. As the millennium turned, however, so too did Moore, reinventing himself — organically, with no hint of cynical calculation — as a close-cropped, genre-spanning stylist, now crafting lush pop and soul tapestries where previously he’d churned out down ‘n’ dirty blues-rock.
Moore currently lives in the Northwest; his fifth studio album was slated to come out on tiny Seattle indie Roslyn until Yep Roc stepped in, intriguingly pitching Luminaria as an Ian Moore record for people who thought they didn’t like Ian Moore records, suggesting it belongs alongside Wilco and Grant Lee Phillips.
Fair enough. With just a couple of exceptions there’s nary a blues lick to be heard here, and even those tunes are themselves hybrids — country/gospel/soul (“April”) and twang/punk/psychedelia (“Bastard”). This leaves nine songs’ worth of ambitious reach. In particular, the seven-minute “Caroline” amounts to an atmospheric epic, with one foot in the Beatles and the other in the Beach Boys, Moore’s soaring falsetto virtually resurrecting the late Carl Wilson. And on “Cinnamon”, Moore croons one moment like Scott Walker and shrieks the next like Jeff Buckley against a neo-baroque backdrop of strings, trumpets, keyboards and Latin-flavored guitar.
No second acts in this musical life? Don’t tell that to Ian Moore, whose aforementioned reach does indeed yield moments of dizzying grasp.
