Summer Moon – With You Tonight

With The Strokes being more on-and-off than a loose lightswitch in a windstorm, and as Julian Casablancas and Albert Hammond Jr. push their own personal and musical envelopes, you can’t blame their bandmates for wanting to do their own thing. So step forward bassist Nikolai Fraiture: Summer Moon is a project that gravitates away from The Strokes but certainly remains in the same orbit.

With its neon pink cover, With You Tonight looks and sounds like retro-futurism come to life. It’s evident in the blissed-out thrash of Class A sounding like a Strokes demo (that’s a good thing in this case, by the way) and it’s also there in Cleopatra; taking a page from the Clash playbook with a reggae-soaked jam washed over with megaphone politics and sloganeering.

Perhaps it’s a surprise that With You Tonight registers at all. Its fuzzy, dream-like patterns and navel-gazing can be hard to interpret, but there is a certain honesty and integrity that underpins the album. Pop hooks replete with dark themes and melancholy shifts: if you didn’t know Fraiture was from The Strokes, you may still have spotted the clues along the way.

In terms of longevity, it’s hard to tell just where Summer Moon stand; the typically ice-cool temperament of Fraiture means you never can tell which side the coin will fall on. For now, it’s enough to sit back and let With You Tonight take over. We can worry about the politics and the bad feeling and the confusion later. If that isn’t a microcosm of our lives right now, then it’s hard to know what is.

Listen to: Cleopatra, Class A