Given that the most noteworthy thing about Herman Dune's new album is the existence of an oddball music video for the single 'Tell Me Something I Don't Know', a promo which features professionally dashing Mad Men star Jon Hamm, it's tempting to search for parallels between the indie-pop duo's music and AMC's stylish drama. The sceptic might suggest that while they are very pretty and carefully thought out, both the album and television series are compulsively uneventful. They'd be wrong, but only because Mad Men is far better than that familiar criticism allows; Strange Moosic, on the other hand, genuinely is rather forgettable. A better comparison would flag up the shared use of the ideas and styles taken from decades past, and note that while Mad Men exhumes the past in order to bury it - in order to show that, aside from the classy clothes and the famous cocktails, the fifties was a horrible place in which to be young, female, gay, or black - Herman Dune are devoted to eulogising and paying tribute to their musical antecedents. Strange Moosic is a studious homage to a whole tradition of left-leaning indie rock; it chugs along pleasantly like a sanitised Jonathan Richman, cheerful and tasteful, but a little limp.
Continue reading: Herman Dune, Strange Moosic Album Review
