Quarrelling with power and vulnerability, FAKE MOON serves up bit-crunched guitars, wavy synth lines and glitched vocals in an album that sees them embark on something far more adventurous than they've encountered before. Shaped in lo-fi grit, the record plays into this "fake moon" - a sinister CCTV surveillance looming us over us like some big shadow. It's this raw paranoia of power that the record navigates all the while acting in an individualistic defiance towards "the man". Initially inspired by the wasps disguised as cameras in 2003 vintage The Simpsons: Hit & Run, it soon developed into something far more anxiety-inducing - and far too real.

The record kicks things off with Heat Death, a repetitive low-res guitar scrunches as if stuck in a cutscene, before Luke Gruntz's vocals boot us up forward into a resolution. Pangs of guilt are mirrored on BAD GUY, the gloomy lead single fends off gritty synth and haunting guitar swoons. (…)

The boys sophomore is an shoegaze scope of a concept almost flawless in execution. A melancholic sound that is best enjoyed staring at ceilings at 3am. This is cleopatrick with FAKE MOON.

(When The Horn Blows)

A sense of vulnerability comes to the fore, admittedly more through vibes than anything else, with the vocal feeling slightly muddied by over-production (‘BAD GUY’) and quite intense moments of background static (‘HAMMER’, ‘SOFTDRIVE’). Essentially, ‘FAKE MOON’ presents a myriad of ‘nearly’ moments. Generously, it could be described as a band bravely testing their boundaries; harshly, an over-worked yet under-developed selection of ideas. In reality, it’s somewhere in between those two positions; to paraphrase Neil Armstrong, it might be a giant leap for Cleopatrick, but they’re a few small steps away from landing it.

(DIY)