• Moon Duo – Occult Architecture, Vol. 1

    Sometimes a side project starts to outgrow its parent band. Such appears to have happened recently with Portland’s Moon Duo, formed by Wooden Shjips’ vocalist/guitarist Ripley Johnson with his partner Sanea Yamada, with the latter band’s lack of activity since 2013’s Back to Land allowing Moon Duo’s more recent releases to fill the gap. Despite plenty of similarities in sound, swapping the Shjips’ looser psych for an increasingly mechanical krautrock sound has seen them gradually become the more essential of the two, and fourth album Occult Architecture, Vol. 1 has done nothing but cement that. Part one of a “two…