Taking inspiration from one’s home landscape remains tried and true on Moonlight Is Sunlight. Paul Banks’ fourth LP invokes the wide open vistas of West Texas, but Banks eschews any Lubbock mafia Americana. Instead, he and multi-instrumentalists Christopher Cox and Matthew Shepherd employ sparse arrangements to stretch out sinuous melodies into the desert skies. “West Was Won” and “Death” follow Banks’ soaring tenor out to the horizon’s edge, while the sedate title track and “Hitchhiker” keep eyes wide and the sunset vast. The band applies its aesthetic to genre-specific forays, including C&W (“No Country for Me”) and soft rock (“Emily [Knot My Nets]”), though worldbeat pop tune “Always the Lonesome Ones” sounds jarringly out of place. Even a jaunty cover of Harry Nilsson’s “Think About Your Troubles” moves from country roads to the infinite highway.

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This article appears in February 19 • 2016.

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Michael Toland started writing about music in 1988 on the Gulf Coast, moved to Austin in early 1991, and has inflicted bylines upon the corporeal and digital pages of Pop Culture Press, The Big Takeover, Blurt, Amplifier, Austin.citysearch, the Austin American Statesman, Goldmine, Sleazegrinder, Rock & Roll Globe, High Bias, FHT Music Notes, and, since 2011, The Austin Chronicle.