Review of Valerie June’s “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers”

Sometimes, rarely, a record will simultaneously catch you off-guard, disturb tidy genre categorizations, and immediately captivate. Such is The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers (Fantasy) by singer and songwriter Valerie June. Too often a blend of R&B, folk, country, blues, gospel, acoustic rock, New Age, and bluegrass (just pick any three, let alone all the above) will sound contrived. It all pours out of June as naturally as exhaled breath.

With an unusual voice that can sound at times uncannily like Esther Phillips with a deep southern twang, June floats through these songs with open-hearted spiritual themes. The warm and multi-dimensional sound of the production is of a piece with the concept: everything is often doubled. Two drummers, two guitars, two keyboards, and overdubbed harmonized vocals. As June put it in an interview with Apple Music, the layering is “for realizing that our thoughts and our intentions, when we join them together with others, that’s what’s creating the world we see. And we can’t have anything without each other.”

There’s even one short track of mostly bird sounds, because “silence is music and no moment is ever completely silent. . . . We’re humans and we’re special, but we’re not the only thing on this Earth, making music.” (OK, so add John Cage to the list of musical influences in my first paragraph.)

At turns meditative, soulful, and jubilant, June delivers an album easily the equal of The Order of Time, which ended up on many best-of-the-year lists in 2017. She’s strikingly and elegantly original in her sound, compositional style, and even her appearance. It’s not ironic pastiche postmodernism; it’s the full sound of contemporary Memphis, June’s home town — all the parts of town, and all of them beautiful.

(Originally published on the Arts Fuse, Sept. 7, 2021)
https://artsfuse.org/236042/september-short-fuses-materia-critica/