A Romance and a Farewell: Luna’s “Romantica” and “Rendezvous” Return on Hand-Poured Wax
There is a particular kind of record collector who does not just want the album. They want the object, the one-of-one artifact nobody else on earth owns in quite the same swirl. Wax Mage Productions has spent years serving exactly that appetite, and on August 7 they are aiming it at two of the most quietly perfect records the 2000s produced. Gotta Groove Records and Wax Mage are reissuing Luna’s Romantica and Rendezvous, remastered and poured into their InkSplosion variants, and if you know these albums you already understand why this is a small event. If you do not, allow me to make the case.
The Best Band You Never Heard Of, In Ink
Rolling Stone once called Luna “the best band you’ve never heard of,” which is both a compliment and the exact curse a cult act never fully escapes. Dean Wareham formed the group in 1991 out of the ashes of Galaxie 500, his beloved and briefly lived dream pop trio, then spent the next decade and a half making music critics adored and radio politely ignored. The Luna sound is a specific pleasure: chiming, interlocking guitars, unhurried grooves, and Wareham’s deadpan delivery, the whole thing descended in a straight line from the Velvet Underground, a band Luna literally opened for on their 1993 reunion tour. This is grown-up music for people who like their melancholy served neat.
The two albums getting the Wax Mage treatment happen to be the last two the band made in its final incarnation, which hands this reissue pairing an accidental arc. Romantica is the sound of a band falling in love. Rendezvous is the sound of one saying goodbye.
Romantica: The Falling-in-Love Record
Luna’s sixth album, originally out in 2002 on Jetset in the States and Beggars Banquet in Europe, arrived in the middle of genuine chaos. The band’s previous label had gone bankrupt, Elektra had already shown them the door, and bassist Justin Harwood had bailed partway through the last tour. His replacement was Britta Phillips, who had toured with Ben Lee and, in a detail I refuse to bury, was the actual singing voice of Jem from Jem and the Holograms. Truly, truly, truly outrageous, and now a working rhythm section.
What happened next you can hear in the record. Wareham and Phillips fell for each other during this stretch, a romance that would eventually cost Wareham a marriage and win him a wife. Romantica is soaked in that new-love glow. The band commuted daily from lower Manhattan to a studio in Hoboken to track it with Gene Holder of the dB’s, then hauled the results upstate to Tarbox Road, where Dave Fridmann (the man behind the boards for the Flaming Lips and, later, Tame Impala) mixed it into something warm and widescreen. Critic Michelangelo Matos pinned Wareham’s “dry martini voice” gliding over the whole thing, which remains the best three-word summary of this band anyone has managed.
One small note for the devoted: the album includes a track called “Black Postcards,” a title Wareham liked enough to reuse years later for his genuinely good indie-rock memoir. The record is full of those little seeds.
Rendezvous: The Long Goodbye
If Romantica is the beginning of something, Rendezvous is the end of it. Released in 2004, it is Luna’s seventh album and, to this day, their final studio album of original material. They cut it live in one big room at Trout Recording in Brooklyn with Bryce Goggin (Pavement, Phish) producing, keeping overdubs to a minimum so that what you hear is essentially four people playing together in a space. For the first and only time, guitarist Sean Eden stepped up to sing a pair of his own songs, “Broken Chair” and “Still at Home.”
The band announced they were breaking up and heading out on one final tour. That breakup turned into a ten-year hiatus, and Luna are in fact touring again this fall, but Rendezvous still stands as the last word from the classic lineup, and it is a graceful one. Critic Mike McGonigal called it their strongest since 1995’s Penthouse and coined the perfect descriptor for its mood, a “Television-on-xanax” strain of indie rock so smooth it threatens to dissolve into the wallpaper. He also, correctly, filed Wareham’s deadpan lyrics somewhere near the New York School poets and Lou Reed. High company, and deserved.
Why the Wax Matters
Here is where a physical media publication earns its keep. These are not standard black-vinyl repressings. Wax Mage, the boutique arm of Cleveland’s Gotta Groove Records, hand-pours its records, which means every copy in a run emerges a little different, a unique marbling of color that will never be exactly replicated again. Romantica arrives as a Transparent Blue with White Explosion variant. Rendezvous comes in Clear with White Explosion. The “explosion” is not marketing fluff. It is the physical trace of how the material was poured, frozen forever in the finished disc.
We have written before about the resurgence of vinyl as an object worth holding, most recently when MGA started pressing fully playable mini records for the collectible shelf. This is the connoisseur’s end of that same impulse. A Wax Mage pressing sits closer to a small sculpture than a commodity, and pairing that treatment with two records this intimate feels exactly right. Music this personal deserves a physical form that is, quite literally, one of a kind.
Where to Get Them
Both titles land on August 7. You can pre-order Romantica and Rendezvous now through Amazon, and given how Wax Mage runs tend to evaporate among collectors, “now” is the operative word if you want one before the resale market gets ideas.
And if the reissues leave you hungry for the real thing, Luna are on the road this fall. Details live at lunamusic.com/news. The best band you never heard of is, wonderfully, still a band.
