A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
My record collection
[274] Luna - Penthouse (CD)
Luna’s masterpiece 3rd LP Penthouse was released in the US† on the 8th August 1995 which means that this week is its 30th anniversary… it surely can’t be that long! This is my CD copy of the album that was the first copy I owned and therefore got an awful lot of play!
I must admit that is another of the odd occasions when a post isn’t random… but I did only think of squeezing it in on its anniversary a couple of days ago so this is both hastily thrown together and a cut and pasted rehash of the post I made five years ago for its 25th anniversary - so, don’t bother clicking that link and just read this post instead!
Here’s some of the press which was, obviously, very postive!
Laura Lee Davies in Time Out, August 1995
In the opening “Chinatown” and the lilting “Moon Palace” the album sprawls its soft, sleek self out like a pet waiting to be adored
[…]
Whatever the mood, though, “Penthouse” is Dean Wareham’ achieving low-slung, urban cool without having to try too hard, which is the only way it should be done.
Stephen Dalton in NME, 12 August 1995
It’s a safe bet that Dean Wareham’s record collection is huge,meticulously catalogued and cross referenced to death. His anal fanboyapproach has often stymied previous Luna outings with AOR staidness,but now, perhaps mindful of this, he’s made his most feisty album yet.The Prozac has worn off, his eyelids are propped up, and Luna areready to rock. Sort of.
Mark Luffman in Melody Maker, 12 August 1995
“Penthouse” is one of those records with its own internal logic, one of those records that, for one delicious moment, shifts your perspective. After playing it, the next dozen records you play, no matter what they are, will all sound strangely WRONG.
Dean was interviewed about Penthouse for the Life of the Record podcast
It was a good time to be in Luna. We were having fun, I think. I mean not that there weren’t some struggles in the making of this record, and was it a little more difficult than we anticipated. But yeah, I guess we took like, I’d say this record took seven weeks to make, which was certainly the longest I had spent making a record. But that’s nothing compared to some other people. When you’re signed to a multi-record deal to a major label, there’s this impetus I suppose to get off the road and you’re like, “Ok we better make a record so we can get paid again” (laughs). There’s good and bad in that. It’s not a terribly good reason to make a record but on the other hand actually it is a good reason to make a record (laughs). It’s pretty understandable. And like I say, it gets you working.
Well Penthouse remains my favorite Luna record. It’s unusual that you hear a record that works from beginning to end and I think this one does that just kind of casts a spell and maintains this mood from track one to track ten. Often times, it’s just like two interesting songs and a bunch of filler. But I think this one, Penthouse, really captured us at our best.
The always fab NYCTaper has a couple of recordings of Luna playing the album in full:
In October 2015 Luna played Penthouse in full for the first time in Atlanta.
In October 2019 Luna played three albums over three nights at The Bowery Ballroom, here’s a full download of the Penthouse show.
The album, famously, turns up in Rolling Stone’s 100 best albums of the 90s
Dean Wareham made his name with the Eighties dream-pop trio Galaxie 500, but he really found his muse in these scandalously beautiful guitar ballads. His foxy voice slinks along the languid guitars as he plumbs his foolish heart in the back of a New York cab, going home alone after another night of fancy drinks and lucky toasts. Wareham purrs some sly one-liners (“It’s no fun reading fortune cookies to yourself”) but the music celebrates the pleasures of being too young, too rich, too pretty and too single, shopping for true love while getting lost in Chinatown.
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 10/013
- Artist: Luna
- Title: Penthouse
- Packaging: Jewelcase
- Format: CD
- Bought from whereever I bought CDs in 1995 for whatever they cost!
Previously in my record collection:
† - While back then US albums were released on Tuesdays, albums in the UK were always released on a Monday so it’s likely that Penthouse was released on either the 7th or the 14th August - the fact that the two reviews from the UK inkies were in editions dated 12th August (and therefore published on the 9th) I’d be inclined to guess the 7th (so they were already in the shops when the reviews came out).