Moon Palace: Luna’s Penthouse at 30

Looking back on the New York band’s shimmering masterpiece

September 2, 2025September 2, 2025 Melody Esme 0 Comments 1995, 30th Anniversary, Dean Wareham, Justin Harwood, Luna, Penthouse, Sean Eden, Stan Demeski

Luna’s Penthouse on cassette. (Image: Discogs)

Listening to Galaxie 500’s seminal 1989 dream pop album On Fire, one can’t exactly hear that singer-guitarist Dean Wareham would find the sweet spot between My Bloody Valentine and R.E.M. only six years later.

Yet there’s already clearly something magical happening, especially on the lush opener “Blue Thunder” and the cosmically creepy gothic ballad “Strange.”

But a year after Galaxie 500 disbanded, Wareham returned with a new band, Luna, and their 1992 debut Lunapark already showed his vision. The songwriting is focused, the textures are atmospheric and lovely, and the jangly guitar work keeps it grounded. But all of this is combined with an edge that often threatens to metamorphose into a beast of calamitous fuzz and aggression, a la Psychocandy.

The mixture of lovely ambient soundscapes, noisy shoegaze and pure songwriting is similar to what Yo La Tengo were working with, though Luna perfected it a year before YLT’s tinkering finally translated into greatness with their breakthrough album Painful. And only three years and two albums later, Luna would release their masterpiece.

The first thing to love about Penthouse is its beauty. Before you take note of how bizarre the lyrics are or how the record builds from song to song, you hear the opening notes of “Chinatown,” and you’re transported to a car, cruising down a city street under the streetlights’ neon glow. I’ve probably only night-driven while listening to Penthouse a couple times, but it feels like I’ve done it far more, because listening to the album just feels like night-driving. By the time you get to words like “You’re out all night, chasin’ girlies/You’re late to work and you go home earlies” and an instrumental section where a spacy guitar solo fuses with vocals repeating “Bom bom bom bom bom,” the song and the album it’s kicking off has transported you somewhere new, somewhere achingly familiar.

It loses no steam with “Sideshow by the Seashore,” which has the record’s best guitar riff, and one of its simplest. Just a handful of notes, some hammers, pulls, and bends, and maybe some whammying for good measure, performed on a Jazzmaster by guitarist Sean Eden. The riff alone — plus a spellbinding use of theremin — would make the song a classic, but it’s here that we first see Wareham perform a singular lyrical trick–an uncanny mixture of broad nostalgia and weirdo specificity. “Then I painted your face/On a twenty dollar bill,” he sings, bringing to mind Joni Mitchell drawing a map of Can-a-daaaa on the back of a cartoon coaster in “A Case of You.” He continues, “And all the comforting words/Provide no comfort/We can all go mad together/That’s what friends before.” And that’s before he gets to the titular sideshow, where “the girls are dressed as mermaids” and “an electrical storm has caught us in a trap.”

“Moon Palace” is more of the same, but better. It’s Wareham’s favorite Luna song, and it’s hard for me to argue with that. If Penthouse is the quintessential night-driving album, then “Moon Palace” is where that becomes not merely a consequence of its soundscapes but of textual intent: “Well we’re travelin’ light/Gonna speed through the night/Only now you recall/It means nothing at all.” Wareham namechecks Christopher Boyce. Then Tom Verlaine comes in on an electric 12-string, because Luna wanted to make the greatest album ever made, apparently.

VIDEO: Luna perform “Chinatown” on KEXP

Much of the remainder of Penthouse, while maintaining a compulsive listenability, seems less outwardly notable than the powerhouse opening. But there’s so much going on every step of the way, from the almost orchestral guitar fuzz of “Double Feature” to the almost bossa nova-ish “Rhythm King” (with the unforgettable lyric, “Nixon’s in a coma/And I hope it’s gonna last”). On “23 Minutes in Brussels,” Wareham goes even sprawling than he ever did with Galaxie 500, and on “Hedgehog,” the band gets to rock out a bit over cutting, sardonic lyrics, somewhat uncharacteristic to the rest of the album, like, “I don’t know what you’re sayin’/But I hate it anyway.”

But the song I’ve played the most is “Lost in Space,” the most melancholic track, with lyrics like “You know there’s something else/But you can’t give it a name/Someone’s selling all your heroes/And it seems such a shame,” and a chorus that cryptically declares, “You heard it all before/They said your case was tragic/You heard it all before/And now they say it’s magic.” Despite this, I don’t associate the song with desolation, but with uplift. It sounds like a transcendent spiritual relief — the exhale of spirit being untethered from the body.

The closer on the vinyl and cassette releases of Penthouse is the six-minute “Freakin’ and Peakin’,” which carries the album to its finish with something akin to an indie rock “Free Bird” — over four minutes of pure jamming. But the CD release featured a bonus: a cover of Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” featuring vocals from Lætitia Sadier from Stereolab. Far from a mere bonus track, this cover epitomizes the sort of sprawling, uniquely urban, uniquely lunar nostalgia that Penthouse captures with perfection. I can’t imagine the album without it.