2308 Would Be Your Road Trip Soundtrack (If Bonnie Henry Did Her Job Poorly)
By Dayna Mahannah
Imagine the love of your life breaks up with you. Imagine travel is safe, and you hop in your Ford Pinto with a sack of clothes, the half-eaten bag of Doritos from the cupboard, and a raging broken heart. Gravel flinging up behind the bumper, you chase the only thing that makes sense—the sun. You crank the volume on the soundtrack to your road trip recovery—2308, Moving City’s ardent debut album.
The Vancouver-based indie-folk duo find room for heartbreak, nostalgia, and love through a winding ten-track feat of acoustic sincerity. Andrew Facciolo, on guitar and lead vocals, injects a breathy twang into tales of the city while his counterpart, Logan Shaw (guitar and vocals), echoes in smooth exhalation.
Opening with what already feels to be a timeless ballad for a melancholic heart, Go It Alone slowly smooths the broken edges, even if it’s a bit of a Trojan Horse for the lovelorn. 2308 coaxes you from the corner of the room to a walk on the seaside with bouncier guitar riffs in On the Line and Bridges, where a sense of the carefree wanders in.
The beautiful instrumental ballad, Murano Man, is a gentle pause from words, but the sounds of a foot-tapping and fingers sliding on strings, of a studio door closing somewhere, invite us into an intimate jam space with Moving City, perhaps a nod to their beginnings.
Facciolo and Shaw met while apartment hunting in Toronto in 2013. The financial logic of living together in a one-bedroom plus den—apartment number 2308—led to endless hours of jamming at home. Life took them in separate ways until 2020 when they met again in Vancouver and spent a pandemic creating a cohesive, dynamic album that feels a little Kurt Vile, a little Destroyer. Urban folk music by campfire slickers on a dusty open road—that’s Moving City.
Hollow in the Darkness is an ambient tune, strangely uplifting in its talk of safe spaces. The strength in this album’s storytelling is its ability to float between the dualities of life with pick-up-and-go ease—like visiting cities on a road trip. Because then the breezy Mayday rolls by, crooning of risk-taking with a take-it-easy attitude.
Same Old Things is the last stop, a place to reminisce, a place where realizations about the not-so-distant past are conjured by indie rock vibes. Maybe, just maybe, they weren’t the love of your life, after all. And that is sad, but perhaps it’s not the worst thing.