No Frills Reviews

I talked about the imagined extended Scouse Psych universe in a previous James Redmond review, and I see The Dream Machine as the new torch bearers for that scene. They released some excellent stuff across three EPs in 2021/22, and could easily have rested on the strength of some of those songs for their debut album. But The Dream Machine seem to be a band that are always pushing forward and looking to what comes next. Although, their music very much has an eye on the past.

You could play a bit of a spot the influence game throughout this album; there’s a familiarity as they incorporate various elements from musical history. They most commonly settle on a mix of late 60s baroque pop and psych/garage rock (I could easily be convinced that a couple of these tunes have came straight off the old Nuggets compilation). This is accessible psych; there’s plenty of hints of weirdness, but it’s generally wrapped into tidy three minute pop packages. Importantly, for as much as they borrow from music’s past, they’ve managed to formulate this into a sound of their own.

There’s a sense of contrast across the songwriting here. This is a group of lads from Merseyside, yet the music often puts you in mind of some nightmarish, mythical Western landscape. There’s a wild-eyed youthfulness fuelling a lot of the songs, but there’s something very classic about the songwriting; like there’s a wise and weary old storyteller narrating these tales. There’s a timelessness to lines like “If heaven is with you, I’m in hell”, only to be brought crashing back to modern reality with hyper-specific lines like “We listened to Jeremiah outside the old Shoe Zone”.

The standout track has to be previous single, Children, My England. They revealed on the Listening Party that they wrote this after being told they didn’t have any songs which could be played on Radio 1. The fact that they knocked this up shows you that they know their way around a tune. It’s kind of like Love Will Tear Us Apart if someone told Ian Curtis to cheer up a bit. And for all their tendencies toward psych weirdness, some of their best moments come when they take the role of lovelorn balladeers, like on Sweet Mary and This Time Around.

It’s a strong debut from an exciting new band, which leaves them with plenty of room to grow and leaves me interested to see what comes next. That could easily lead them to being indie stars if they aim for more tunes that could be played on Radio 1, or they could just as easily delve deeper into psychedelic experimentation, which they seem to have reined in here. Either way, I have a feeling there’s better to come from them yet.