Goodtimes are killing Dion Lunadon
Not really. His recent show at Liar's Club finds him alive and kicking
DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—As I wrote in this newsletter last October, the D4 are among the bands I regret never seeing live. I love their two albums immoderately, and they had a reputation as a killer live band. When the D4 split up in 2006, guitarist and singer Dion Lunadon played in a couple of bands, none of which I particularly connected with. He subsequently fell off of my radar.
I’ve only recently discovered that he’d relocated from his hometown of Auckland, New Zealand to Brooklyn years ago, and since 2016 has been enjoying a solo career, releasing an EP, a couple of singles, including a collab with Kate Clover, and three albums, a self-titled debut in 2017, Beyond Everything (2022), and Systems Edge (2023). A new album, Memory Burn, is out later this month. When I learned that he and band were coming to Chicago to play at Liar’s Club, a fave joint of mine, I was amped. Liunadon, in his late forties now, and having played loud rock and roll since he was a teenager, is already a rock and roll lifer. He and his well-oiled band—Craig Bonich on bass, Jake Pflum on guitar and keys, and Dylan Cascante on drums—brought energy, spirit, and spectacle to a sparse but enthusiastic crowd.
In these days of dire news and the promise of bleak, difficult months ahead, Friday night’s show felt nearly heroic. A much needed balm against approaching storm clouds, anyway. Lunadon’s a pro, and I was grateful for his and his band’s attention to “rock show” detail:
The showmanship began before the show, actually. On my neighborhood stroll before the bands hit the stage I spotted a strikingly tall, rocker-looking dude on Clybourn Avenue, leaning up against a wall, in quasi-pose: angular yet somehow shaggy haircut, slim jeans, denim jacket, pointy black boots. An hour or so later he was under lights playing bass with Lundon.
Before their first number, Lunadon, Bonich, and Pflum huddled together in front of the drum set, slyly conspiring, a pseudo street gang, before Bonich, after a nod from Lundaon—the Clear Leader—began the bass line that kicked off the raucous opener, “Goodtimes.”
They brought a smoke machine (!), employed at strategic moments: the opener; the closing suite of songs, etc.. Liar’s Club is a tiny joint, and I very much appreciated the band’s stadium-sized gesture.
At the start of the show, I spotted a metal box hanging from Lunadon’s mic stand; in the latter songs of the set Lunadon flipped a switch that distorted his vocals to Goth-like levels of gruesomeness, while another switch bathed the joint in enormous reverb.
Near the end of the set, Lunadon, his band riffing behind him, produced a black velvet bag, held it up for the crowd’s scrutiny, and then invited a woman near the front to reach in. She demurred for a moment, and Lunadon seemed to chuckle genuinely at her reserve. Midwest caution on her part? Maybe it was an understandable instinct given that Liar’s Club is reportedly haunted.
Anyway, she eventually steeled her courage, plunged in, and pulled out a thick metal chain, glinting in the stage lights, which Lunadon took and proceeded to use to play his guitar, producing deafening, steely screeches. He jumped onto the floor in front of the stage, really leaning into the bit. His beat-up Gibson SG, with its deep scratches and chipped white paint, looked like a fifth member of the band all night, and was happy to play along.
He used his whammy bar like a kid with his first axe. When he wasn’t wailing away on his guitar he held it by his side, neck pointed downward, like a gun in its holster. He intentionally, theatrically busted all six of his strings during the last number. Etc..
I can imagine a humorless someone rolling their eyes, dismissing this stuff as corny showmanship. I loved it. I needed to lose myself in a band that earnestly gave their all to super-charged songs, to slashing guitar riffs, to high-octane eighth-note mania, yet who also recognize that rock and roll is as much about musicians’ mock-heroic dynamism and ironic humor as it is about their songs. When asked by Joyzine a couple of years back what inspires him to make music, Lunadon responded, “My dopamine receptors. Making music makes me feel alive.” Watching him feel alive gets my heart going.
“Goodtimes are killing me,” Lunadon sings hoarsely on his new single. The chord change moments later revives him, but the song chugs onward, stubbornly insisting on the perils of hard living. Though Lunadon’s all about rousing rock and roll, gloominess lurks in many of his songs. “Can you feel the dark bleed into me?” he wonders in “Goodtimes,” the song’s clamor and charging momentum rendering the answer obvious. In the furious and furiously fast “Hate,” a song from Schreien, a limited-release EP Lunadon put out in 2020, the complaints hollered about in the verses are reduced in the brutal chorus to three words—anger, depression, hate. Everything’s distilled; the desperation recalls the D4 at their unruly best. The song’s over in a minute and a half—another five seconds and it would come apart. Onstage, Lunadon doesn’t smile much; he looks preoccupied, focused. But he’s also wound up by the music he and his band are making, affected, moving on the stage as if he’s trying to dodge his own sharp-edged riffs. It’s serious business, leading a band into the bold places your songs go.
“No Control,” from his debut, slows things down to a near-dirge, anchored by Cascante’s chilling four-on-the-floor. Channeling Alan Vega and Lux Interior, Lunadon moans about love lost, his voice echoing in ghastly waves, the sound of anguish sounding down empty halls, everything slipping from his grasp. At Liar’s Club, the song’s three-note minimalism altered the mood of the evening graphically, and with “Eliminator”—in which Lunadon turns to demented, late-era-Stooges Iggy Pop for vocal guidance—dragged the band into a different, scarier place. At this point, Lunadon was waving that heavy chain around, leaping from the stage, dragging the chain up and down and across his tortured Gibson, reducing everything to primal ooze.
To be honest, this isn’t my favorite Lunadon head space—I prefer speed to downers—but it challenged the room, and I appreciated it. Asked recently in It’s Psychedelic Baby magazine about his writing process, Lunadon name-checks his unconscious: “I try to write spontaneously and record streams of consciousness ideas so I don’t have too much time to think about it,” he remarked.
Not all the time, but a lot of the time. That keeps the ideas organic and allows things to come through that I probably never would have come up with. I know this kind of music has been done many times before but this is a way to add some sort of uniqueness.
Near the end of the set, the band whipped out “1976,” the b-side to Lunadon’s 2016 debut single. A charging, three-chord news summary of the year Lunadon was born, the song cites, among other cultural touchstones, Patty Hearst, the Concorde supersonic airliner, the death of blues guitarist Freddie King, and Sara Jane Moore’s assassination attempt of Gerald Ford (Lunadon’s off by a year there, but, hell, I’ll chalk that up to the time zone difference between the U.S. and New Zealand). At Liar’s Club, he announced it as a song about his favorite year, and it tore off the roof. When Lunadon plugs in to what moves him, take hold of something sturdy.
In Joyzine, Lunadon was asked, “If you could give any aspiring musician one piece of advice, what would it be?” He replied, “Be willing to die. If not, don’t waste yours and everybody else’s time.”
Pink Frost, the Chicago band that preceded Lunadon’sset (local punk rockers Tÿre Fÿre got the evening started), played as if they’d wholly internalized Lunadon’s charge. Pink Frost once characterized themselves this way: “We play rock music. We like large kick drums, tube amplification, and face melting. Thanks.” I’ve rarely read a band’s self-description that felt quite so apt. Pink Frost played taut and intense songs, each giving the impression of starting at the crest of a wave and staying there, balanced atop a potential death drop. As I watched, knocked out, I searched for the right metaphor: every song was a new, furious front being established in some aggressive war; each song felt that it would be ideal on an action movie soundtrack. I found myself comparing Pink Frost to other bands—Japandroids with better melodies, maybe? Finally, I just gave in to the sound, a tuneful roar that did all of the thinking for me.
Guitarist and singer Adam Lukas behaved like a lightning rod onstage: humming; trembling; ultimately diverting the power into his band’s huge, sprawling songs. Guitarist Angela Mullenhour, holding on to her Gibson as if it might fly away from her body, looked genuinely amazed at the sound that she and the band detonated, as if, even if she helped to create the music, she were as surprised as I was. At the end of the night, I passed Mullenhour on Fullerton, just outside the club. She was grabbing a smoke. I told her how much I dug the show; she smiled, said Thanks so much, I appreciate it. She looked completely blissed out still, as if a spell hadn’t been broken yet. That look on her grateful, wowed face: it’s the reason I go to shows.
All photos ©Joe Bonomo
Great read - and sounds like it was a fun show!