For a debut album from a sole 22 year-old, David Vandervelde sure makes it hard to believe either of these things. Particularly when he plays 90% of the music (teaching himself the instruments he didn’t know), and self-produced the album. Whether he is smitten by the ‘70’s sound, or the notion of weekends spent lying in a bedroom listening to vinyl Bowie and T-Rex, David Vandervelde has captured the essence of this time.  From the very start, The Moonstation House Band exudes nostalgic sounds; the freshness of the music belying its origins; whipped up from Bangs-era Rolling Stone and dusty Fillmore posters yet it sits comfortably amongst today’s indie offerings.  It’s proof that a great song is a great song, no matter the genre .

Vandervelde’s crate-sifting makes it difficult to pin his sound to a single band, although his constricted, treble vocals certainly make the Marc Bolan comparison easy. Despite this, the maturity with which he executes this sound leaves many revisionist bands wanting, as he glams with the best of them.  Somehow Vandervelde brings something new to the staid genre, lifting it up into our consciousness for new consideration. Opener ‘Nothin’ No’ is the embodiment of every idealised youth, forbidden fruit and temptation. This teenage idyll, manifest in the unreservedly revisionist lyrics, envelopes the listener in warm summer evenings, long hair, girls in summer dresses and afternoons spent getting drunk and high on the porch. At the same time the sprawling glam is set against burning vocals and multiple layered instruments wrapped in the swirling fuzz of guitars. A perfect ‘70’s revival, its sheer spontaneity means the song walks on the right side of that fine line between dreamy nostalgia and cynical saccharinity.

Unlike many an album opener, Vandervelde’s second place, original single ‘Jacket’, picks up where its predecessor left off. Although using the reduced tempo to introduce a more conventional rock stomp, his trademark vocals, used in their constricted, filtered manner, ensure that the glam leanings are still clearly apparent. The beauty of Vandervelde’s achievement lies in the simplicity of his warm melodies.  There is none of the pretension, costume and pomp of the glam era, leaving only the stripped sound of the decade’s hooks – and ‘Jacket’ has them in bucket loads.

It is this restraint that allows the switch into ‘Feet Of A Liar’ to pass muster – though he could not have pushed the disparate tempos any further without killing the powerful buzz he had created. Lacking the vigour of the openers, the atmospherics are ramped up in its place, and Vandervelde’s heavily filtered vocals echo across a dense canvas of gentle bells, percussion and strings.  It is his warm starry night, following the restless afternoons of ‘Nothin’ No’ and ‘Jacket’.

Despite the fawning media surrounding wunderkind Vandervelde’s responsibility for almost the entire album’s music and production, he was not entirely alone. Former Wilco member Jay Bennett helps out on bass and production; engineer Steve Churchyard (The Band, Wings) is present; but most importantly David Campbell, famous string composer that has appeared on the work of such artists as Elton John, Mariah Carey and Leonard Cohen, guests on three tracks. Vandervelde’s music retains the rough edge and innocence of a 22-year-old’s debut; consummate as it is, it exists in a different realm to that of Elton John et al, thankfully lacking the highfalutin arrangement and grandiose production of such releases. To the album’s detriment, Campbell’s appearance results in a forced attempt to elevate Vandervelde’s sound to these levels, stripping it bare of the excitement and immediacy otherwise present .

Only on ‘Wisdom From A Tree’ do Campbell’s arrangements manage to overcome this criticism. Possibly due to its placement – following on from the vacuous ‘Corduroy Blues’ – the track’s vocal and instrumental layering result in the album’s best moment, one of sheer unadulterated excitement. The strings lead you down the garden path, the tempo to-ing and fro-ing before the chorus bursts out amongst soft-drink-commercial ‘ahhh’s’; it is absolute enjoyment, a slightly guilty pleasure akin to listening to Gold FM for too many hours.

Such refreshment and masterful production only reinforces the query over ‘Corduroy Blues’ painful existence.  Excruciatingly trapped between Disney and Lloyd-Webber, it is outstandingly misplaced on this album, an aberration only enhanced by its appearance in the coveted number four spot. The song is an abject failure; turgid strings, vapid lyrics and heavy-handed production result in an overblown offering of the most pointless kind. To a lesser extent, this is also true of album closer ‘Moonlight Instrumental’ (another of Campbell’s efforts), which only escapes the same wrath due to its sheer superfluousness. It does not assault the listener with lyrics, nor have any pretension towards meaningful purpose as ‘Corduroy Blues’ does, and instead simple wanders aimlessly towards the relieving end of its 6 minute existence.

Thankfully, lying between this wretched pair are ‘Can’t See Your Face No More’ and ‘Murder in Michigan’, two further examples of Vandervelde’s incredible potential.  Belonging to a sound reminiscent of the Sleepy Jackson’s Lovers and Elliott Smith’s XO respectively, Vandervelde again shows his press release’s foresight in asking us to look past Moonstation’s Bolan sound. Similar to Smith’s ‘Son of Sam’, ‘Murder in Michigan’ is beautiful to the ear, despite its dark subject matter: “When will you learn that you get what you deserve/oh, my black eyed Susan”. An impossibly rich folk ballad, the string sections are seamlessly entwined, woven through the song in support of Vandervelde’s multi-layered harmonies. If anything, while not as immediately rousing as ‘Nothin’ No’, there is a fair argument for this, rather than the opener, being the album’s most consummate piece of ‘70’s revivalism.

Vandervelde’s amazing skill is deliberately replicating a specific sound with such freshness that makes this fact ignorable; from Bowie to ELO, Fleetwood Mac to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Vandervelde does it all. Wearing his ambition on his sleeve, he has the chops to pull it off. While his best tracks are exquisite examples of all that was once good about this music, the tendency towards over-production and pretension on a couple of songs does leave a question mark hanging. Nonetheless, I’m forgiving this filler’s trespass; The Moonstation House Band is an excellent introduction to David Vandervelde – if only it had been a more streamlined EP.