Dion Lunadon by Alexander Barton
Rock ’n’ roll is a catch-all for countless musical styles that revolve around a backbeat and guitars. It’s been dissected, stitched together, morphed, revived and re-done in a thousand ways, for better and sometimes worse. Yet Bumblefest headliner Dion Lunadon keeps finding electric new combinations, and he’s nowhere near done.
“I just love rock ’n’ roll, and I don’t think there’s much good stuff out there,” the New Zealand-born, Brooklyn-based bandleader tells PureHoney. “There’s a lot of cheese.” Lunadon is incinerating the mold off by “trying to stay creative and try things that people haven’t done,” he says, “like playing guitar with a chain.”
That chain he rattles on the cover of 2023’s Systems Edge isn’t just a photo prop, and it’s just one key to Lunadon’s solo output. Think overdriven amps, sinks of reverb and a ton of swagger. Think Link Wray, black leather and bad-moon-rising vibes. It’s a parallel world to the one Lunadon occupied as singer-guitarist in The D4 and bassist in A Place to Bury Strangers, though all share that unbridled, soulful, undefinable spark.
Leading his own project “means digging deep and trying new things musically and otherwise,” he says. “It was the same with the other groups but this is a little different as it’s such an insular endeavor.
Lunadon’s solo outings only seem to double down and dive deeper into the mysterious well of youthful recklessness that has been his hallmark since relocating to New York in the 1990s. Which is to say that his new mini-LP, Memory Burn, teed up by the singles “Zenith Forever” and “Goodtimes,” feels new by being utterly bad-ass rock ’n’ roll.
Imagine that: Short, sharp shocks, mainlined into a sonic artery, are what we need to feel that thing that makes extreme music vital to the human condition and amplifies our capacity to have mind-blowing experiences. “My favorite bands are the ones I witnessed that changed my life,” Lunadon says. “I’d like to do the same.”
Bumblefest is Sept. 6 and 7 in downtown West Palm Beach. bumblefest.com dionlunadon.bandcamp.com ~ Tim Moffatt
