Rendezvous

1	Malibu Love Nest 4:31
2	Cindy Tastes of Barbecue 4:09
3	Speedbumps 3:06
4	The Owl & The Pussycat 3:49
5	Astronaut 4:06
6	Broken Chair 3:56
7	Star-Spangled Man 5:13
8	Motel Bambi 4:29
9	Still at Home 5:12
10	Buffalo Boots 3:29
11	Rainbow Babe 3:22

Barnes & Noble

Luna make music that's perfect for a sunset drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, a lazy Sunday morning spent drinking coffee and reading the paper in bed, or the romantic little moment of your choice. Over the course of a dozen years and seven albums, their sound hasn't really changed -- frontman Dean Wareham has cribbed so much from Lou Reed's songbook for so long that you almost forget he didn't come up with these sounds first. However similar they may be, each Luna album brings something special and new, so it's sad to hear that the band have decided to call it a day. Luckily, they've left this one final gift before closing the door for good. Rendezvous opens with the zippy "Malibu Love Nest," rife with the cute-but-silly rhymes only Wareham could get away with. "Astronaut" is the disc's other pure pop moment, and Britta Phillips's bass line owes more than a little to New Order's Peter Hook. The rest of the album is awash with the dreamy sounds that Luna make so effortlessly: "Cindy Tastes of Barbeque," "Buffalo Boots," and "Rainbow Babe" rank among their finest tunes. Wareham even lets lead guitarist Sean Eden take the mike for the first time, and his contributions -- "Broken Chair" and the truly lovely "Still at Home" -- hold promise for a great solo album somewhere down the line. We hate to say goodbye, but we can't imagine a fonder farewell than this. Bill Pearis

All Music Guide

On their seventh and final -- according to Dean Wareham -- collection of two-chord anthems featuring languid social observations and quietly perverse come-ons, dream pop veterans Luna do little to cement their handprints in rock & roll history. Rendezvous couldn't be more anticlimactic, but the Galaxie 500 spinoff was never about exclamation points. Recorded live in the studio, Wareham and Sean Eden's hypnotic guitar playing resonates deeper than on previous outings, ably complementing the singer's wry, bohemian non sequiturs, but even standout tracks like the rollicking "Speedbumps," the wistful "Still at Home," and the lush "Broken Chair" -- the latter expounding on the group's recent forays into alt-country -- seem destined to fall off the disc itself, climb out of the window, and hitch a ride back to their creator. There's an air of indifference throughout the record that keeps otherwise excellent tracks like "Malibu Love Nest," with its sly, late-night debauchery, grounded in the superficial. Wareham, whose 2002 collaboration L'Avventura with bassist/singer Britta Phillips remains a career high point, continues to mine the Velvet Underground, but his demeanor throughout Rendezvous feels more reserved than reverent, resulting in a string of songs that, like Luna, hints at greatness but never seems to choose the fork in the road that might take them there. Reverend Lee Power