Kevin Bronson on July 24th, 2019

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Cartalk is the solo project of Chelsea “Chuck” Moore, whose music lingers in the sweet space between dreamy shoegaze and open-hearted Americana. Moore calls it “tenderpunk,” and for the first Cartalk single, “Noonday Devil,” you can italicize tender.

Moore’s band name came from a text exchange with Kenny Becker of Goon, and Cartalk’s first single — and the album that will follow — was produced and engineered by Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties. Behind the lovingly distorted guitar swells in “Noonday Devil,” there’s a banjo, as if to tickle the provocative lyrical collage out of the songwriter. “It’s a sentence break / Comma between patterns / Oh the love we made / I’ve got a noonday devil,” Moore sings oh-so-dreamily.

This is no standard-fare confessional, to be sure. Moore explains that the song is intended to help the listener “feel grounded despite the dizzy dance of one’s own trajectory.” Either way, while you are parsing the songwriter’s streams of consciousness, it is most certainly a transcendent listen.

||| Stream: “Cartalk”