Featuring The Eccentronic Research Council‘s Adrian Flanagan and Dean Honer and Fat White Family‘s Lias Saoudi and Saul Adamczweski, The Moonlandingz are both a side project and a semi-fictional guitar pop act, whose latest single “Black Hanz,” is as the band refers to in press notes “a song for our times, born out of abuse; abuse in the workplace, abuse in the street, abuse by the sniveling toe rags we call a government, abuse for daring to dream and to be different,” and “a celebration of the Outsider, the socially inept . . ” Sonically speaking their sound manages to mesh a facsimile of the Manchester sound — twinkling synths, guitars fed through delay and effects pedals and a driving motorik groove — paired with a sneering and ironic punk sentiment, and a mischievous and menacing spoken word section towards the song’s bridge.
The recently released video features a Ziggy Startdust-era David Bowie rocker who gets picked on, ridiculed and threatened everywhere he goes for both his ridiculous, alien-like appearance and for having the bravery to not fit in. The video goes into much stranger territory when the rocker’s Fairy Godmother swoops down to save him from a bunch of thugs — and then promptly places him where he belongs, fronting a rock band. Simply put it’s fittingly and goofily low-budget while emphasizing the song’s central theme of celebrating those who are proudly different and are proverbial square pegs – but with a subtly 60s psychedelia.
The project’s full-length debut effort was co-produced by Sean Lennon and the band and was mixed by Dave Fridmann, best known for his work producing Flaming Lips and Tame Impala, and is slated for a 2017 release through Chimera Music across North America and Transgressive Records in the UK and elsewhere.
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