Move On The Sun is a collection of songs from Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Collaborative Production company HitRecord. If you haven't yet heard of HitRecord, it is an online community of creative folks. Anyone can join and the site now has 80,000 plus members who can post all sorts of creative stuff from short stories, to artwork, to their music. As soon as you upload anything, while you may still own it, your creation, your art is given to the HitRecord community at large to do with what they want. They can re-mix your songs or adapt your art into other artful endeavors. This collaborative effort is why their are 78 contributors to the 15 songs that were eventually realized on this album. It is definitely an interesting concept and in this case, on this particular album, this process has mined some musical gems. The songs run the artistic gamut from indie R and B, hip hop hybrids with touches of jazzy sounds, electronica, alternative folk with a gloomy bent, dark indie rock, experimental and pretty indie pop. Each and every song is very listenable and some truly stand out and beg you to learn more about the artists who created them. While there is a fair amount of so called experimental works and alternative sounds, this collection runs right down the middle of the underground /cool hipster elite road. Damn, all the songs sound so polished and well produced. Some seem perfectly suited for a cool hip high end beer commercial, namely: Diamond In The Rough, Enjoy The Ride or Downtown 81. Others like The Grind and Anicca are well rendered instrumentals exhibiting some seriously jammy musical throw downs (especially the Grind) but elements on both these songs can tend to sound cut and pasted a bit too much. How much you like these songs maybe dependent on how much you love that type of thing. The sultry indie pop of More with a (Fiona Apple-ish) vocal performance (that is to die for) hooked me deeply although I could of done without the spoken in French portion which felt a bit pretentious to me.
In the end, Move On The Sun is, indeed, an ambitious piece of work and I applaud the way it was created. It does, though, play it safe. There is nothing too dangerous on this record. Nothing unpolished or raw which is sometimes makes for the most listenable experience. Standouts for me are the addictive indie pop of the title track Move On The Sun, Malibu which seems to begin in it's raw form until it is morphed into a version sounding a bit like a One Republic production (I would of loved to hear the initial version), Wolves in The Woods, a darkly driven guitar track with superb vocals (The could be a Feeding People song), Why Am I So Dizzy, acoustic at it's core that expands to a sweeping piece or alternative folk and finally, The Good Stay Young (interlude) which at 36 secs wanted me wanting more.
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Robb Donker
MOVE ON THE SUN at hitrecord.org
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