Luna: Rendezvous

A cool, collected breakup rather than an acrimonious blowout feels perfectly fitting for Luna, a band that's spent its years playing with such solid level-headedness that it became easy to take for granted. It didn't help that each successive studio album—the new Rendezvous brings the total to seven—blended, watercolor-like, into the next, or that Luna's first two (Lunapark and Bewitched) set the bar for detachedly cool indie-chug so high. But Luna moved through its own gently changing cycle just the same, as seemingly aloof to musical tides as those tides were to it. There's something to be said for that sort of independent-minded casualness, especially since refusing to yell "Look at us!" practically guarantees that fewer people will.

Rendezvous, which Luna leader Dean Wareham has announced as the group's last, makes no grand statements and turns no sharp corners: It doesn't have any more or less urgency, as though the band is choosing to ignore the album's finality instead of trying to shake things up. Instead, Luna sidles along as it has for years, with Wareham's deadpan smarts resting atop laid-back guitar-driven tracks that look to The Velvet Underground for spiritual guidance.

The ghost of VU guitarist Sterling Morrison (who guested on Luna's second record) rings through more clearly than it has in the past couple of albums, particularly on Rendezvous' spirited album-opener "Malibu Love Nest" and the excellent "Astronaut" (reprised here in an almost imperceptibly remixed form from Luna's Close Cover Before Striking EP). Elsewhere, Luna rides its woozy breeze and mellow sweetness ("The Owl & The Pussycat"), drifts into a bit of boredom ("Broken Chair"), and shakes itself loose via Wareham's always-engaging lyrical strangeness. It flows far better than 2002's Romantica, but that increased fluidity, along with a couple of lead-vocal contributions from guitarist Sean Eden, still add up to what could be titled Another Solid Luna Album—thankfully no less and unsurprisingly not much more.