Goon – Heaven Is Humming – Vinyl, LP, PTKF Records, 2019
Vinyl LP pressing. Heaven is Humming has been a long time coming. Three years coming, to be exact: singer/guitarist/songwriter Kenny Becker, singer/guitarist Drew Eccleston, bassist Caleb Wicker, and drummer Christian Koons started work on the album in the summer of 2016, right around the time Goon’s debut EP Dusk of Punk came ripping in from the Los Angeles sky, spilling from the brim with monster riffs and deep hooks.
“The initial seed of an idea was to make a full-band record-not a solo bedroom thing, which is really all Goon had been up until that point-and I think that idea persisted throughout,” Becker says. “I thought to myself, ‘This will be the rock album,’ for lack of a better way of describing it. The whole thing is loud and hits really hard, but it feels like it actually takes you places. To me it actually doesn’t feel super cohesive, which I kind of like about it. It’s not just ten or eleven hard-hitting rock songs. It’s… weird.”
Heaven is Humming is indeed weird in it’s fearless abandon, but it’s also comforting and familiar at the same time, taking the sounds of foundational groups like Pixies and Boards of Canada and contextualizing them through a modern lens, placing Goon alongside contemporaries like Forth Wanderers, METZ, Young Jesus, and Partisan label-mates Dilly Dally. Becker croons like Michael Stipe one minute and snarls like Frank Black the next, but you never lose the sense of who these four guys are making a beautiful racket right in the here and now.
