Liam Moore’s mission statement is simple. “Liam wants the songs stuck in his head to get stuck in yours,” reads his Spotify bio. “Then he wants an ice cream sundae.” We should all aspire to sum up our personal ambitions as clearly and concisely as Moore; what’s more, his music fulfills the promise of that mission statement. (The first half of it, anyway, although I suppose the ice cream sundae is implied.) In its eclectic sound and unassuming presentation, Moore’s music feels like dispatches from the inside of his mind, tidied up just enough to get the message across.
“Doctor,” Moore’s latest, is just under two minutes long, but he fits a lot into the song’s compact runtime. It begins with a rubbery bass line that pinwheels throughout the song, creating a nice polyrhythmic feel alongside the drums; strange, oscillating guitar textures, sounding almost theremin-esque, pop up here and there as well. Moore has listed art-rock outfits like St. Vincent and Tune-Yards as inspirations, but a more direct comparison would be Talking Heads: Moore shares an eccentric warmth with David Byrne, as well as a similar way of singing vowel sounds.
The lyrics deal with a period of stress-induced insomnia. “All of my anxieties/starting to catch up with me,” Moore sings, as he watches “the clock move from midnight to three.” I’ve tossed and turned through sleepless nights as well, and I see some of my own experience in Moore’s. Insomnia has a way of making you painfully aware of time passing: you stare at the ceiling, then at your phone, then at the clock, and then you close your eyes for what feels like an hour before you open them to find that only five minutes have passed. As your morning alarm comes closer, you start to do mental math and ask yourself questions: how many hours of sleep can I run on? How many cups of coffee will I need tomorrow? Can I fit in naptime? For fuck’s sake, can’t I just sleep?
“Doctor, doctor/Tell me a tale, tell me a tale,” Moore sings at the start of the song, which struck me as unusual. I’ve never heard anyone go to the doctor asking to hear “a tale.” When people go to the doctor, they usually want to hear answers; they want someone to go under the metaphorical hood and say “well, there’s your problem, mister.” But a tale? Tales are knotty, unruly things, and if they provide an answer it’s rarely straightforward. Moore likely knows this, just as he knows that there’s no simple answer as to why he can’t sleep at night. He just wants to hear something, something that might, for a moment, make sense of this mess he’s in. And Christ, if that’s not relatable, what is?
