Revisiting Half Moon Run's Dark Eyes
[original draft written 8-8-25]
As with most people, a lot of my formative music taste happened when I was a teenager and young adult. Naturally, some music is period-defining for that moment of my life, with most of it consisting of indie folk and alternative rock. One of my favorite albums from those days was Dark Eyes by Half Moon Run, an album I discovered through a friend of mine during our mutual developing affection for Of Monsters and Men. He had seen OMAM live, and the opening act was Half Moon Run, who had around that time released the absolutely electric song “Call Me in the Afternoon” and its enigmatic music video, which he sent to me. If you’ve never heard it before, I really can’t recommend it enough as an introduction to the band. There is something uniquely haunting, almost tribal, and exhilarating about it, like it would be best listened to while dancing around a bonfire ritual in the dark of night. Suddenly, you are brought to an awareness you are a hair’s width barrier away from losing all inhibitions, from communing with some ancient, primal, feral self. At the time, I had never heard anything like it. In a way I was even scared of it. It is seductive.
Of course, I had to listen to the rest of the album. And, unsurprising coming from the same vein as “Call Me in the Afternoon,” the whole work carries this bewitching sense of the occult, often evoking and intermixing imagery of drug use and spirituality. It is a frightening juxtaposition for a sheltered religious teenager, but simultaneously invitingly taboo. “Full Circle” made me nervous, with the most explicit reference to a possession of sorts, setting the dark, drug-laced spiritual tone of the whole tracklist in the very first lines of the album:
Cap off kneeling at the back of the church
feeling water on your brow, if it’s healing it hurts
At first a sharpish pain that returns as a thought
that the needle in your skin will bring you closer to God
And I watch
as your head
turns
full circle
The narcotic imagery spreads across the album, serving as a sort of bridge between the material and the spiritual (or the demonic). And it musically lends itself to all sorts of dark thoughts, with folk guitar arpeggio, melancholic ghostly vocals, and even a wailing harmonica. It is not an album for happy people, even at its most energetic. No, this album is for the coven when we are sacrificing goats and casting blood hexes in the woods unbeknownst to our husbands, and doing drugs. What I’m trying to say is that thematically it is a thoroughly enchanting album—one that makes you feel tantalizingly debaucherous and, from a third-person perspective, voyeuristic. You are not supposed to be seeing any of this, but you can’t look away.
I took the opportunity to revisit Dark Eyes recently because I received an email. Long, long ago, when I had bought the CD through bandcamp, I got signed up for the band’s newsletter. Occasionally I glanced at it, but I wasn’t a religious reader. In fact, I didn’t listen to their music much either past their first album. Their sophomore release, Sun Leads Me On, is a great album in its own right, and when I first heard it, I was surprised I had put off listening to it. But it still didn’t stick with me the same way over the years, for whatever reason. Maybe it was the novelty of Dark Eyes or my ever-developing music tastes not leaving room for it, but I didn’t really feel compelled to keep up with their new material. So when I received an email alerting me that Dark Eyes released thirteen years ago, and that the band was answering some questions about the album to mark the anniversary, I went ahead and read through it, and of course I had to listen to it again, too.
I hadn’t listened to the album in its entirety in quite some time, but was happy to let it play again. It reminds me of days long gone. Some days good, but some very, very sad. There was a day when I was seventeen and let “Drug You” play on repeat while I drew a sad drawing I have never shown to anyone—quite a cathartic song to play when you are emotionally distraught and have never abused a drug in your life but wish that you could, just to numb the pain. I remember sharing “She Wants to Know” on a warm summer night with a friend who I’ve since grown distant from, but at the time I really appreciated our little music exchange—she had a really positive impression of this song, I recall. Another night, the following summer, I had fallen asleep with the album playing, and I woke up at 3am with “Nerve” playing under my pillow, its soft lament singing out into the quiet cabin I was sleeping in alone; were anyone to have heard it from outside, they would have believed the cabin haunted. Right now as I write this, I’m listening to “21 Gun Salute” finish as my coworkers timidly try to kill a cockroach. The song ended before I was done typing that sentence.
The album resounds in my memories of late high school and early college. I listened to my favorite tracks countless times, which now fill in as background music in the nebulous reaches of my mind, increasingly blurring with age. Perhaps there’s no better place for such an album to transfix itself within one’s psyche than one of such mystique and impermanence. I have already forgotten so much from those days, and the somber harmonica of “Fire Escape” cries over the hazy visions of my life back then. Perhaps the reason it stuck so deeply with the Jamie of twelve to thirteen years ago is that it fits so comfortably in the liminal space of transition and change, the witching hours of life which bring one to a realm of uncertainty and reckoning. Those days are gone—were they ever in the first place? My only proof is the faulty gray matter clinging to any foothold it can find that the world outside itself is truly there. My memory of the music certainly makes it feel as though it all happened, yet draws it all into question simultaneously. I don’t think I personally would be saying such things if instead of Half Moon Run I’d been listening to, say, Ed Sheeran at the time.
I don’t think I have any business rating albums. I won’t be giving it a numerical score or a star rating. All I can really say is that Dark Eyes is a long-time favorite of mine, and that if you have been at all interested in my descriptions or anecdotes, then I recommend taking 45 minutes to listen to it. In my mind it’s kind of a sleeper hit, and a “cult” classic in both senses of the term. Half Moon Run seems to have maintained a devoted fanbase over the years, which makes me happy. They left a lasting impression on me, so it just felt right to share my appreciation for them. I’ll be listening to Dark Eyes again at the next séance.
Cheers,
Jamie Barne
Still as rain
falling down