"[9] They'd followed up by signing to the Too Pure label and releasing the Secondhand Clothes and Beautiful Pigeon EPs, both which better incorporated their interest in the dub-bass-heavy post-punk sound of bands such as Public Image Limited and The Pop Group, and which also began gaining critical attention due to the band's unusual sample-driven and rhythmically propulsive sound drawing on breakbeats, electronica, psychedelia, art rock and Krautrock.

[10] Moonshake had also developed a method of alternating between the different song-stylings of Callahan and Fiedler – each of whom contributed, sang and dominated songs which were simultaneously fleshed out and expanded by the other in terms of extra instrumentation and production ideas.

Fiedler, in contrast, whispered or murmured most of her vocals,[3] and created more impressionistic songs focussed on interior psychological landscapes and surreal takes on emotions, relationships and responses.

[9] The album's lyrical subject matter was often uncompromising, taking in at various times urban alienation, English insularity, prostitution and sex-murder, ecological issues and abortion.

Louder Than War has commented "[Callahan's songs] are all angry, vitriolic diatribes about human injustice and dysfunctional societal subjects set to keening, urgently propulsive arrangements, underpinned by those huge dub basslines, off-kilter hip hop drum patterns and topped with shards of acidic, coruscating post-punk guitars with all kinds of disorientating samples thrown into the mix: bhangra motifs, shrieking brass and saxophone interjections (although some of these are also played live), detuned keyboard effects, creaking doors, machinery, etc.

Whilst Fiedler's vocals may be low in the mix, the discordant maelstrom that whips around her, sometimes delivered through defiantly obtuse jazzy time signatures, creates an even greater sense of dislocation.

"[9] Callahan recalls the band as having been "well prepared" for the Eva Luna recording sessions, following extensive rehearsing (with co-producer/engineer Guy Fixsen already involved for advice), but that they'd also embraced opportunities to improve the material further while in studio.

After years of being out of print and unavailable for download, Eva Luna was reissued in download-only format by Too Pure (by that time, part of the Beggars Banquet group) in 2020.

[15] In The Wire, Kevin Martin followed a similar train of thought to Mulvey, stating "Moonshake are city dwellers enthralled and appalled by urban dog-eat-dog survivalism.

On Eva Luna tales of love and loathing are set in a cosmopolitan dub zone, where disparate styles clash and the musical bulk is shadowed by relentless percussion and furtive sampled figures... Fiedler's torched singing sounds traumatised – as her sinister whispers outline internal persecutions in a Lewis Carroll world of beasts and birds.

Their rhythmic mobility, shrouded by endless loops and discords, maps out an inner city neurosis which rivals PiL's "Death Disco" for Low End disturbance and Uneasy Listening.

"[16] In Melody Maker, Jim Irvin struck a more cautious note, commenting that "Eva Luna is Moonshake's big book of wild stories...

It threatens to turn their music into something you admire rather than love, but then I feel the same about Can, the Fall, Captain Beefheart, things which infuse the Moonshake sound [which] can be as wild and humid and all-consuming as a thunderstorm...

[citation needed] In AllMusic, Steve Huey reflected that "Eva Luna is bursting with ideas and tension; dissonant instrumental lines careen off of both samples and spacey dream pop textures, resting on a bed of hypnotic dub bass grooves and deliberate, deeply funky percussion... Callahan delivers his tales of despairing cynicism and rage over modern urban life with theatrical growls and nasal wails, while Fiedler's hushed murmurs and understated purr belie the aggression lurking under her songs' often nightmarish psycho-sexual dramas.

Above all, Eva Luna's sound collages are dark and edgy, regardless of whether their overall tone is mellow or furious; the album's dense layers of sonic detail and the ebb and flow between Callahan and Fiedler's contrasting songwriting styles make it a richly inventive, endlessly fascinating listen..."[1] In a Trouser Press overview of Moonshake's work, Douglas Wolk described the music of Eva Luna as being "always big, weird and unnerving", singling out "the whomping single "Beautiful Pigeon"" and "Callahan's best song, a cancerous dub-rock slither called "City Poison".

Pointing to the relative brevity of the songs on Eva Luna as indicating their separation from post-rock, Avelli instead reinforced the album's connection to post-punk artists such as PiL, Gordon Gano, Rip Rig + Panic and The Pop Group, concluding that what Moonshake did was to "take the groove (funk, dub, jazz)... burden it with an industrial aftertaste and project it into the '90s", reasoning "although still far from the idea of post-rock as a new progressive rock, there was often a tendency to plot over the long term, creating a hypnotic sense and perception in the making, while here the songs are played in the short term.

[citation needed] As part of an in-depth examination of both band and record (in Louder than War in 2022), Martin Gray described the album as "a complete anomaly among the sounds of 1992", "an album simply crammed with... highlights", "exhilarating sturm and drang" and "a formidable statement of intent" (as well as in lyrical content, being "disturbingly prescient today in the light of what we have just witnessed in the past couple of years post-pandemic and post-Brexit.").

[10] Praising the "utterly spellbinding, dizzyingly genre-defying approach at articulating explicitly the sound of a city in the throes of urban psychosis and derangement" and describing the first half of the album as "a totally astonishing five-song salvo", Gray's review took note of what he saw as the record's musical callbacks to Sun Ra, bhangra, free jazz and Raymond Scott cartoon scores; and he tagged original album opener "Wanderlust" in particular as "a curiously bizarre hybrid of eastern exoticism, Afro rhythms and boho free jazz tempered by an insistent — almost swinging — percussive backbeat, embellished with the oddest samples you will hear: all detuned arpeggios, clangs and fluttering snatches of urban detritus.

"[10] Gray concluded that "Eva Luna really is one hell of a ground-breaking record, and it stands resolutely alone among all of the albums released in 1992 as no other band has managed to create anything remotely similar before or since.

"[10] While reviewing Callahan's third solo album, Down to the Marshes, in 2024, Dave Cantrell of Stereo Embers recalled how Eva Luna had not "simply knock[ed] me sideways but seemed to open up a fresh new chamber in my listening heart.

Shapeshifting, knowing but vulnerable, its offhand archness of tone offset by its ability to nonetheless scorch your senses, there was this peculiar, somewhat elliptical directness to the Moonshake vibe, not least due the sinuous, often minor key but incandescent guitar lines snaking through the mix that somehow managed to simultaneously capture via its melodies while leaving you pleasingly off-balance with its cleverly disjointed structures.

This proved successful, and Eva Luna sounds prescient even now with its soupy fusion of flavours and techniques...They might not have shared the loudness or riffing of their later peers, but their experimentation captured the very essence of the genre.

Dubby basslines intersect with shoegaze guitars, early trip hop beat experiments, samples of obscure ’60s psych records, hypnotic loops and otherworldly psychedelia.

A thrilling collision of sampledelia, shoegaze and post-punk - imagine if someone put early hip hop, My Bloody Valentine and PiL in a blender..."[6] Reviewing the reissue for Brainwashed, Anthony D'Amico revealed "listening to this expanded reissue now with considerably more adventurous ears, I still find this album oft-frustrating, but I am newly struck by how almost every song features at least one moment where Moonshake sounded like the best band on the goddamn planet...

"[7] D'Amico appreciated the inclusion of the two Fiedler-era Moonshake EPs, Secondhand Clothes and Beautiful Pigeon, judging them "generally every bit as good as Eva Luna...The band's previously bootleg-only 1992 Peel Session is a bit of an inspired inclusion as well, as Callahan and Fiedler switch vocal duties for alternate versions of a few of their strongest songs... Moonshake at their best rivals the finest work of any of their more revered influences or contemporaries.

"[7] In another extensive essay (on Medium), Melissa Thyme Monroe drew attention to the band's use of noise rock (at a time when the genre was under-explored within British music as compared to the American scene), as well as commenting on their employment of psychedelic approaches and their connections with trip hop.

The lyricism from both songwriters contrast in a much similar way, with Fiedler diverting from her relatively conscious counterpart by creating whispery poetry around odd, uncomfortable imagery like pot-bellied she-wolves and animals eating other animals..."[2] Monroe concluded that "while the archived history of the band didn't highlight much internal tumult, give or take the confused label fiascos plaguing them since birth, it was certainly unstable.

It also has the uneasy, almost unfinished discomfort that I feel is sorely missing from music these days: one that isn't afraid of being loud in the cityscape, that is dissatisfied and angry at the daily wrongs that hostile urban governments force upon you.