Lunar Vacation, Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire
As one would expect of any historic city, the houses in Decatur, GA are old, and while many have been renovated to suit the needs of the 21st century family, the one Lunar Vacation calls home has not. The porch is quaint and crumbly, the roof leaks, and there is a single bathroom shared by the band’s five members who insist that this is not, actually, a bad thing. “We go on tour and share a hotel room for a month and then all come back to the same house,” guitarist/vocalist Maggie Geeslin says cheerily, aware that to most, this scenario sounds maddening. “We’ve become homemakers together.” Just beyond the porch, the small vegetable garden produces enough to be proud of; in the cramped living room, there is always enough room for a house show, or a jam session. For ten months out of last year, engineer/bassist Ben Wulkan transformed the room into the ad-hoc studio wherein Lunar Vacation wrote and demoed their fearless sophomore album, Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire. “I used to be so protective of the songs when I gave them over to the band,” lyricist/vocalist/guitarist Gep Repasky says. “There’s so much trust involved, but this house helped us grow as best friends, as musicians, as a band.”
That newfound sense of trust is apparent on Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire, whose title, taken from the concluding track “You Shouldn’t Be,” is a thesis statement. While Lunar Vacation’s last album, 2021’s Inside Every Fig is a Dead Wasp, happily bathed in the waters of indie pop, their latest effort is exploratory, a product of many hours shared experimenting in a living room together. Inspired by prolific shapeshifters like Yo La Tengo and Björk, Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire adopts an ethos that every idea has the potential to be a good one. “Our last album was super produced, manicured,” Maggie says. “This one’s organic. We embraced mistakes; it made the work even better.” In other words: everything matters, everything’s fire.
Once billed as a band of high school friends, Lunar Vacation have transcended the cloying designation of “just kids” and have confronted the sink-or-swim mentality that overtakes you the minute you’re out of your parents’ basement. “Stop being so bitter,” Gep self-admonishes on the chorus of “Bitter” over a plodding, bony arrangement anchored by Connor Dowd’s drumming that summons Television. When they wrote the song, there was a lot to be bitter about; Gep had undergone a year of emotional tumult that led to a psychiatric hospitalization, which was both traumatic and transformative. Most of Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire documents that period, which the rest of the band witnessed as Gep’s closest friends. “When it happened, everyone was there. They brought me a note in the hospital, they brought me clothes, they brought me books.”
