The Junk Rumblers – Cold Moonlight (Album Review)

Cold Moonlight is the high energy and fast drumming debut ten-track album from The Junk Rumblers, a rock outfit.  At four years old, this album is receiving a significantly belated review.

Writing about their album’s title, the group poetically says that “Cold Moonlight” describes the chill you feel when looking up the full moon in the midnight sky, when darkness surrounds you, and the wind is carrying the fear of the unknown on its [sic] wings.

If that’s poetic as well as spooky, the spookiness is also carried through the group when it says that their sound has ‘driving beats, the thumping of the upright bass and guitar melodies that steer each song to its destination, the vocals propel the listener to dark shores’.

‘Shadows in Flight’ launches us into the world that The Junk Rumblers have built. Underneath the 4/4 rock backbeat pulse, the rhythm is given unflagging energy by a relentless, quick-fire steel drum that fires notes across every beat. The clean lead guitar rises above the fray, acting as a second, soulful voice whose precise, melancholic phrasing allows the track to breathe. The overall frantic tempo and instrumental approach lend the track the urgency of a fast country song.

The Junk Rumblers have provided lyrics of their album on Bandcamp. Lyrically, in the song’s first line we’re introduced to a killer on the run. In the next line, we see the Devil ‘licking at his heels just like a faithful dog’.  We see here the use of figurative language. It’s comical to have the Devil do what he’s said to be doing.

We can simplify the story here by saying that the lyrics move between fear and hope. While the killers are on the run, women and men are urged to get a knife and a gun. Ultimately, blue skies are not far away.   

On ‘Double Trouble Road’, the frantic drumming returns, but the dynamic has shifted: the signature clean lead guitar is replaced by a crunchy guitar. This instrumental change moves the song out of the fast country territory and definitively into straight rock and roll. Vocally, the singer attempts to match the sheer speed and intensity of the backing track.

Lyrically, you never know whether The Junk Rumblers are singing about humans or something else. On the face of it, the song has romantic links to it. For example, the lyrical persona meets ‘my baby there by the side of the road’. At one point, she (the lyrical persona’s baby) talks about it being time to fly.

The song continues the romance narrative by focusing on profound loss, where the lyrical persona describes the intense burn resulting from their partner’s departure and permanent absence.

However, the most impactful line arrives when the persona delivers the chilling observation to the partner: ‘I see trouble dancing in your eyes’. This is a particularly heavy line which calls for heavy thinking if one has the time, energy and know-how.

In ‘Say My Name’, the furious rhythmic engine of the previous songs is slower. The music slows to a moderate pace. The drums, having lost their previous relentless intensity, now maintain a simple, steady pattern, giving the track a more relaxed feel, with guitars more prominent. The vocals align with the track’s relaxed pulse, offering a more measured and nuanced performance. In a way, the vocals are listener-friendly here.

Lyrically, our lyrical persona here is ruminating on their life, time and days. You feel as if they’re negotiating their end or demise. The end in here is inevitable, but the lyrical persona is not ready to let go.

Frantic drumming returns in ‘Sweet Talkin’’. The song’s about our lyrical persona talking up this character – most probably a woman. The persona tries using loaded words like ‘sweet’ and ‘pretty’. Cheesy words, if you will. The lyrical persona admits in the song that they are a sweet talking, sugar-coated son of a gun. But it’s best to take their words with caution, for they seem to repeat themselves. They seem as if they’re struggling to get this woman to walk and ride with them.

‘I Got My Eye On You’ is a return to the frantic, quick-fire drumming subdivision. The song functions as a direct courting song. The lyrical persona, who has been observing the addressee for some time, now urgently seeks commitment: asking the person to stay and declare their love. The persona’s language utilizes hyperbole in lines such as, ‘I jumped the moon baby when you smiled’.

There’s a sense of cynicism if you read ‘Off The Rails’ as a song suggesting that one try some ‘dirty deeds’. Be that as it may, there’s a sense of resignation that comes through when you come across lines such as ‘You’re just living for the day’ and ‘(you’re dying for the night’). There’s no light at the end of the tunnel in this song. Its last line is: ‘In the end you’re gonna pay’.

On ‘Blood On My Hands’, the established sonic textures converge, delivered by the crunchy guitar and the melodic lead lines over a rapid-tempo drum beat. ‘Blood on my hands’ is figurative language for violence, if not murder. The lyrical persona employs elevated figurative language, declaring themselves a ‘holy flame’ – a metaphor for purity or powerful conviction. This dramatic self-assessment is immediately contrasted by a line that grounds the persona in everyday reality: they are explicitly revealed to be an ordinary person who ‘reads the news’.

On ‘The Lonesome Fight’, the drumming assumes a deliberate and lethargic tempo, immediately establishing a weighty, slower pace for the song. Later in the track, the drums seize the center stage, generating a disorienting rhythmic feel through complex and seemingly disjointed syncopation.

It’s one of those spooky songs. Something awful is about to go down. The lyrical persona likens the ‘smell of danger’ to ‘hot corpse breath’. The song’s final line is even spookier: the lyrical persona admits that ‘it’s the end of the line for me’.

On ‘Beneath The Sun’ we see a lyrical persona dealing with the issue of death. When they are gone, we hear them tell their addressee, that they should ‘lay my head down on your chest’. This is the only instruction they leave when their end comes – an end they have no problem with.

The album concludes with ‘Watch Out’, a song featuring a crunchy guitar tone set against rapid, high-energy drumming. Using first-person plural, the lyrical persona tells us the many things they’re gonna do. The list is almost ridiculous: they are gonna run, have some fun, fly, ride, slip and slide, rock, twist, kiss the stars, creep, and listen to a song. They’ll do it all, the song even acknowledges. And they won’t give up ‘till we have it all’.

SCORE/Excellent: The most unmistakable signature of the album is the relentless, driving percussion; The Junk Rumblers clearly rely on the sheer force of the drums to define their sound. While this makes the overall experience somewhat monotonous, fans of fast-paced, high-velocity drumming will find the record entirely satisfying. However, the album suffers from a lack of dynamic range, leaving the listener wishing for a few more of the lighter, more nuanced tracks.

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