Consumer Guide Album

Luna: Penthouse [Elektra, 1995]
"If the war is over/And the monsters have won/If the war is over/I'm gonna have me some fun," confides born noncombatant Dean Wareham, whose only recorded partisan act is rooting for Nixon to expire. Wareham creates his music from the vantage of a slacker of independent means. Once darkness falls, all Manhattan (or Tacoma, Brussels, wherever he gets to tour) is his playground. But he spends most of his life in what sure sounds like a high-rise, where he drinks in the afternoon, wheedles his good-for-nothing girlfriends, studies his record collection, and cooks up guitar parts. Being as he's discovered the Go-Betweens, that seems like redeeming social value enough for me. A