Massachusetts-based Thomas Erwin, who records under the moniker Niagara Moon, has referred to himself in official bios as “The Maestro of MIDI”, but that’s selling him short. Besides being brilliant on a technical level, Erwin also writes smart songs that have the timeless quality of standards. For anyone already enthralled by the cosmopolitan vibe of Niagara Moon’s music, Cool Warm Night, the sixth and latest one, is the best one yet.
Besides making music as Niagara Moon, Erwin also co-hosts Losing My Opinion, a podcast for music obsessives that also features Matt Longo, who makes music under the name Thin Lear. The podcast easily proves that Erwin is a student and fan of all types of popular music (as well as not-so-popular music). As a result, his songwriting takes cues from a variety of genres and eras. For this record alone, Erwin has listed the following influences: Joe Hisaishi, Steely Dan, Jim O’Rourke, the Band, Elliott Smith, the Divine Comedy, Keith Jarrett, and Paolo Conte. It’s a wide range, and not a surprising one once you hear the album in its entirety.
Erwin plays nearly everything himself on Cool Warm Night: essentially keyboards and electric bass, and is ably assisted by Darrell Nutt and Aaron Shafer-Haiss on drums, Huimin Wan on harmony vocals, and Andres Hayes contributing saxophone on one track, the jazzy ballad “Down with the Ship”. The one-person Niagara Moon band truly shines from the start, as “Cool Warm Night Pt. 1” kicks off the record with a brief but striking orchestral (or “orchestral-sounding”) instrumental.
Almost as if to underscore the LP’s musical diversity, “Cool Warm Night Pt. 2” follows, and it’s an upbeat, Burt Bacharach sophisti-pop marvel with some delightful turns of phrase. “The fear of the unknown has dropped down to a quiet drone” is a line that stopped me dead in my tracks.
Like artists ranging from Randy Newman to Paul Heaton, Erwin is an expert on marrying catchy melodies with lyrics that can be disturbing or even just weirdly off-kilter. “All Work (No Play)” is an irresistible toe-tapper that may or may not be about a workaholic with a serious drinking problem. In the psychedelic, folky “Primary Colors”, Erwin enters areas of lyrical abstraction, offering hallucinatory imagery: “I had a curious dream last night / From a stranger’s point of view / Primary colors were all we saw / Black and white turned red and blue / And for a moment I could feel the world folding in.”
Then there’s the baroque oddity “Disappointment Friday”, the swaggering pop-funk of “Big Plans”, hugely melodic and sounding like Wings meets Supertramp circa 1976, on the same record as the ambitious “Simple as That”, with enough sophisticated moving parts to sound like progressive rock. Erwin’s often deadpan vocal delivery hints at off-center 1970s pop singer-songwriters like Michael Franks or Stephen Bishop, or even contemporaries like Office Culture.
Niagara Moon’s Cool Warm Night ends the way it begins with an instrumental. Bookending the 11 songs this way adds ornate symmetry, which feels like the right move, as the album is both sophisticated and meticulous in its structure. “Little Infinities” is a luxurious midtempo number that leans toward elegant jazz-funk and feels reminiscent of CTI Records artists like Hubert Laws and Herbie Mann. Niagara Moon described the album as “a celebration of those occasional pockets in life where you can feel free, inspired, and things line up just right”, which almost sounds like a tagline for a THC seltzer ad, but that makes sense: this album truly packs a warm buzz.