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The Sounding Board

This unexpected reptilian return is mostly worth your time

by Ben Hohenstatt on September 23, 2025

A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.

Arctic Moon

Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. I’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely under-heard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.

Have you heard the improbable comeback album recently released by a much-admired British rock band?

No, not the seemingly universally feted Suede album.1 No, not the mostly pretty good Pulp album.2 Not the Loft, either, but that’s getting warmer, and if you’re a regular reader, you’ve hopefully heard some of that one.3 No, this week, as indicated by the headline and banner photo above, I’m asking if you’ve heard Arctic Moon, the new LP from the Chameleons, a Manchester band with an off-and-on existence that dates back to 1981.4

It’s the band’s fifth album across nearly 45 years of history, and the Chameleons’ first long-player since 2001’s Why Call it Anything? Its seven tracks make for an enjoyable, albeit inessential, listen that makes a good enough case for getting the band — including founding members Vox, the lead singer and bassist previously named Mark Burgess, as well as guitarist Reg Smithies — back together again.

At first, Arctic Moon threatens to be much more. The album begins with its most energetic and best song, “Where Are You?” It’s a fiery neo-psych jam built around rowdy riffs. Crucially, it’s also relatively concise, which gives the track a nice sense of momentum. Some songs on Arctic Moon stretch past the seven-minute mark, and don’t entirely justify it. In comparison, “Where Are You?” uses its four and a half minutes well, incorporating vocal and guitar harmonies to great effect.

Ultimately, the album-opener promises slightly more fun than the Chameleons can deliver, but they keep their heads above water for the next track. “Free Me” is mostly a breezy, jangly and starry-eyed song, sample lyrics: “It doesn’t matter what they say/ It doesn’t matter what they do/ I wouldn’t change a thing about you,” but it also takes occasional detours into a darker proto-prog territory. Cracks start to show on “Feels Like the End of the World,” which has a pleasant orchestral sweep that’s juxtaposed with an acrid outlook. Vox has heard and seen a lot in his years, and it’s hard to put much stock in platitudes and would-be panaceas when instinct insists that we’re in end times. That’s a pretty relatable sentiment, but Vox chooses to express it with some ham-fisted lyrics that sardonically insist a future of skipping hand-in-hand into heaven’s promised land is good news for “the Holocaust Jews and the people of Japan.” It is an abrupt evocation of World War II-era tragedy that could definitely be phrased better. Another clunker comes in the form of a ponderous spoken word section that includes the rhetorical question, “All of us can read the signs of the sky and the Earth, how is it we can’t read the signs of the times?” The song’s length is commensurate with the scale of its concerns, clocking in at seven minutes flat, including a fairly protracted outro. “Feels Like the End of the World” is, in Nathan Rabin terms, a fiasco. There are some good ideas in there, and a bold vision, but the execution is uneven. That’s true of the rest of Arctic Moon, as well. Except for “Saviours Are a Dangerous Thing,” which rocks in a mournful way totally befitting of an album-closing track.

“Free Me” reins things back in for five minutes of rock’n’roll grandeur indebted to Mott the Hoople, which serves as a bit of a preview for the nearly nine-minute “David Bowie Takes My Hand.” There are audible allusions to Bowie in that song, but the reference mostly serves as a reason to wax fatalistic and build a stately, not-quite epic soundscape. On “Magnolia,” the Chameleons try to use a moody, reverb-touched beginning to build toward moments of louder power. The effort falls flat. In places, the music is loud, but it sounds thin. To make matters worse, Vox’s voice gets washed out in the mix while making an emotional declaration. Things pick up toward the end of the song as lyrics cede all available space to a jamming outro, but there’s a solid five minutes of song before that happens.

None of those songs is terrible. Even the worst among them is completely listenable and features fine musicianship. However, they are intractable for pop-leaning rock music, which makes Arctic Moon a special type of difficult when something goes awry. On the few tracks, which still represent a solid quarter hour of music, when the Chameleons fire on all cylinders, though, they’re simply special.

  1. Antidepressants is currently Suede’s highest rated album on Album of the Year, at an 87. Rate Your Music, which would be less affected by a paucity in online reviews to aggregate, a factor that can drag down classic albums on some, has it at No. 5 behind Dog Star Man, Coming Up, Suede, and Autofiction. That seems closer to right. ↩︎
  2. I reviewed that one for Spectrum Culture. More is provably better than anything Pulp did before 1992, but worse than everything since Separations. There’s a lot to like on it, but Jarvis Cocker’s leering voyeur schtick can be downright unpleasant now that it’s coming out of the mouth of an ultra-wealthy man in his 60s. It’s great that Cocker still loves life, and its tangible pleasures, but immortalizing in song the fantasies he has about women who cross his path on public transit was a regrettable choice for a still quite sharp songwriter. ↩︎
  3. Covered here back in March. I liked it a lot. ↩︎
  4. As is often the case with these sorts of things, this iteration of the band’s history has a more recent starting point. Two original members, plus musicians who had played extensively with the Chameleon’s lead singer reformed in 2021. They’ve put out a few EPs in that time. ↩︎

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