Joon Moon

With their debut album Moonshine Corner, Franco-American  band Joon Moon present an elegant, discerning retro sound they’ve built  quite literally from the ground up – producing it in their  custom-designed Studio 237 in Paris. “We wanted total freedom to produce  the music as we liked, without rushing during the sessions,” explains  Joon Moon’s primary songwriter, Julien Decoret. “So Studio 237 was built  in 2015 over four months of hard work by our hands.” Their analogue  approach lends an authenticity to the project that harkens back to the  legendary jam sessions of L.A.’s Wrecking Crew and Motown’s Funk  Brothers, but with a modern, world-travelled twist.

Decoret met  his co-producer, drummer Raphael Chassin, in 2005 on a recording session  for French electropop band La Boetie; eventually, both toured with  Bossa Nova new wave cover ensemble Nouvelle Vague. Both came from  musical families; Decoret’s early forays into musicianship arrived via  classical guitar and the influence of his flamenco-playing father, while  Chassin idolized the American bands that performed in his parents’  small private jazz club in Never. Chassin fueled his 50’s rock ‘n’ roll  fascination by collecting vintage percussion kits, like Slingerland’s  sought-after 1940s Radio King drum set. Decoret, meanwhile, began  picking up new and strange instruments during his travels. “As I became  interested in world music, I bought a lot of small instruments from  Europe, India, South America, and now have quite a big collection.” One  of his favorites is the eerie-sounding glass-rod Cristal Baschet organ,  but many find their way into Joon Moon’s evocative songs.

“We  always start the same way: recording piano and drums, then bass,  keyboards, vintage organs, and voice,” says Chassin. “The initial  structure is all Julien’s influence. He loves classical music, which  shows in the way he writes string arrangements.”

“There’s my  influence, but also Raphael’s influence,” adds Decoret. “Even though  he’s not directly writing the notes, he’s got a real artistic vision. I  know jazz records, I know Motown, but it’s not my culture. He finds a  way to open the doors, to influence me.”

The duo initially tapped  longtime friend and “Fade Out Lines” vocalist Phoebe Killdeer to write  simple lyrics that would cleverly hint at broader, more universal themes  within the duo’s heartfelt, jazzy melodies, like the yearning, romantic  ode to faded love, “Call Me”. But Killdeer’s solo success pulled her  away from Joon Moon, and so Decoret and Chassin found themselves in  search of a new singer, one who could translate the soul, depth, and  drama of Bill Withers, Howlin’ Wolf, and Nina Simone to Joon Moon’s  modern-retro aesthetic.

No match could’ve been more perfect for  this than Krystle Warren, a Paris-based, Kansas City-born expat with  gospel roots who moved to France in 2008 to promote her first solo  record, Circle, having worked with such wide-ranging acts as  Rufus Wainwright and Hercules & Love Affair. With her androgynous,  smoky contralto, Warren is a dead ringer for the likes of Simone, as  well as husky-voiced pop stars like Sade and Q Lazzarus. “The first time  we heard her voice we were almost crying,”

Chassin remembers.  “She’s got something really special which you don’t see so often with  other singers,” agrees Decoret. “Usually with Krystle you don’t need  more than two or three takes on a song. It’s as if she were hearing it  before the songs are written. She breathes the music.” Live, she brings  an effortless, commanding power to the stage; Joon Moon wowed audiences  at this year’s KCRW Austin City Limits SXSW showcase, as well as Los  Angeles’ infamous School Night! parties, where the band made their U.S.  debut. “It was really packed and hot, but even without knowing the  songs, the crowd was really fun and by the end got really into it,”  Decoret says. “That’s something really special with the American  audiences – when people feel that you are really into it, they come to  you at the end of the show (even the body guard at the front door!) and  explain in a really good way why they liked it.”

Warren  also brings adroit songwriting chops to the table. Take, for instance,  “The Tiger,” which pulls inspiration and structure from the rhetorical  William Blake poem of the same name, updated to call out to spurious  characters in both personal and political realms (topped off, naturally,  with Decoret’s brassy sax arrangements and a rollicking outro on the  Philicorda, a Sixties Philips organ). Warren’s Southern Baptist  upbringing especially comes through in the bluesy, existentialist “Get  Down;” through her retelling of the allegory of Job, Warren encourages  listeners to keep striving through difficulties and appreciate blessings  no matter how few.

After the runaway success of their  first single “Chess” (which found American audiences thanks in part to  the support of KCRW) the band released a four-song EP of the same title,  followed by two more extended plays (Call Me and Tiger). Some tracks from each of these reappear on debut full-length Moonshine Corner,  alongside unreleased gems that concern themselves with topics as  sweeping as going to the movies alone (wistful piano-driven ballad  “Crash”), odes to drinking the night away in dive bars (the playful,  stuttering “Jimmy Thirsty Cow”), and of course, unrequited love.  Scattered throughout are clues to the bands’ influences and origins: a  haunting French-language cover of Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong”  references the alt-rockers at the height of their Amnesiac-era experimentation.

Like  Radiohead, Joon Moon seek to infuse each of their songs with an  otherworldly aura courtesy of their unusual choices in arrangements and  instrumentation, but their universal lyrical themes bring them swiftly  back to earth, while layering Decoret’s double bass Phil Spector-style  with a 1968 Hofner bass identical to the one Paul McCartney played with  the Beatles lends a certain nostalgic familiarity as well. “We believe  in the songs we record, we believe in this voice with incredible force,  and we try to show this as simply as we can,” says Decoret “We’re not  concerned with what the market wants, we are just doing what we love  with the instruments we love in a studio we built with our hands. Even  with our different influences, we are totally honest in the way we  produced this record.”

Perhaps most telling is the album’s snappy  lead single “The Mask,” which humbly takes the music business to task:  “If I play it nice and sweet/Push it on the beat/Will I move you?/I  could be your favorite/But are you even worth it?” Warren asks, then  breathlessly references Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” before acquiescing  to the commands of music’s most basic drive – “Everybody clap your  hands/Everybody dance.” Joon Moon are the real deal – forgoing the  kitsch of other bands with vintage proclivities and instead forging a  genuine and convincing brand of jazzy pop bursting with intelligence and  soul. Perhaps we aren’t worthy of it, as “The Mask” suggests, though  anyone listening through Moonshine Corner would be hard-pressed  not to hum along, tap their toes, or otherwise feel as though they’ve  stumbled on the exceptional house band of some secret Parisian jazz  lounge, where the smoke of a thousand Gauloises drifts lazily toward the  rafters. They could be your favorite, too.