Where does Moviola land in 2025?

I’d like to think it’s upon a weird road map that connects Columbus, Ohio, (where the band gestated) to somewhere on some land out in the rural exburbs of Columbus, or in Battleboro, Vermont, or on a desolate block of Brooklyn. Their travelogue is a twisted vine. A beverage on any porch, on any stop on that highway, means the same thing, especially if there’s a Midwestern sunset in the distance. The porch doesn’t matter; we are all looking at the same sun.

If my objective is to get you to listen to Moviola right now, and what they’ve become in the “now,” a history lesson isn’t apt. They’ve been a band that has dabbled in the Grateful Dead’s school of traditional folk and jam Americana, the abject melancholy of a domestic life, and the tilted indie rock and cloudy alternative hues with which they began. Or we could examine the conceptual heft of their last album, Broken Rainbows, which went absolutely for broke and looked down into the greatest void the everyman must face. They performed it onstage in full, and it was a cathartic night. It would be kind of selfish to want them to make Broken Rainbows II. Though they’ve settled into a steady pace, they never seem content concentrating on just one thing, so a sequel would feel cheap.

In sitting with Earthbound (Dromedary Records), their ninth full-length since forming in 1993, it’s not a surprise that Moviola are leaning into an even more collaborative—let’s call it collective—front. It’s all over that map. These are men of leisure, tanning in the apocalyptic twilight. No matter where you are on their hill, or where they are in middle age, you should head back and listen to The Year You Were Born, an album from 1996 built in Moviola’s most achingly beautiful phase. Earthbound taps directly into that well, with Jake Housh’s lovingly pained voice and earnest beacon. “Gathered in Bloom” could surely be beckoning back to that achingly beautiful phase, and might be the band’s greatest song. It’s a perfect distillation of three decades of songwriting, steeped in sepia-toned vibes.

You hope that the music becomes timeless in opposition to the references. A very pointed song, “HIllbilly Effigy,” that directly names our vice-president, leans into the anxiety of our daily politics. But let’s imagine that we all forget his name a decade from now, and we laugh instead at that forgotten name. Or take “Slage Wave,” a rollicking, almost traditional, romp about the working man and his comic existence. What’s the point? It’s all pointless.

Above all, though, there are deadly serious messages within, but there’s always a smirking hope (a silver lining?), especially in “Questionnaire,” when Housh says, “World don’t know how to turn anymore.” Whether they’re doing deadpan Velvets on “Knocked Down” or Stonesy smut on “Stunt Your Growth,” it’s done with a grand, elegiac celebration of lives well led.

Moviola may be too terrestrial to be considered like Grandaddy or the Flaming Lips, too straightlaced to be the Strapping Fieldhands, too Ohio “ope”-wit to be in line with David Berman (but close), too inherently democratic to crack one formal code of creation. And therein lies the magical qualities that have sustained the myth of Moviola. Tortoise and the hare? Maybe. It’s a wonderful myth to explore.