The Soft Moon
About to release a fourth studio full-length is Luis Vasquez, aka the Soft Moon, whose album Criminal is due in February, several weeks in advance of their Casbah appearance on April 14. If you enjoy industrial-inclined locals such as Author & Punisher and Crash Worship, you’d probably appreciate the young Oakland songwriter’s krautrock-inspired approach to noisy, occasionally robotic post-punk, which on previous releases was mostly instrumental other than bits of Vasquez’s mumbly vocal tracks massaged between layers of the mix. His 2014 album, Deeper, seemed the perfect distillation of his 21st-century muse, a collaboration with Maurizio Baggio that was inspired by a period spent living abroad in Italy.
Now back in CA, he just debuted the first single for the upcoming album, “It Kills,” again recorded with Baggio and promoted with a darkly mythic video directed by Kelsey Henderson that unfolds in flashing multiscreen clips of barbed wire, burning flowers, bombed cars, and crashing jets. The bill includes Boy Harsher, an electronic coldwave duo featuring singer Jae Matthews and producer August Muller from Northhampton, MA, best known as the birthplace of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic books. (Photo: Marion Costentin)