Last week I mentioned four album releases which were on my radar. The debut from The Dream Machine is my album of the week, which you can read about below. I’ll hold off on thoughts about the latest from The National, as I’m still only a couple of listens in and it has grower potential.
You can sample one of the standout tunes from the new Jessie Ware album on this week’s playlist. My quick fire thoughts on that album; full of shiny, funky, disco-pop and pretty good, but runs out of steam towards the end (regular readers know my thoughts on this – everyone needs to be making shorter albums).
And the last one on my list was Reverend And The Makers’, Heatwave In The Cold North. Musically it’s pretty good, bringing some soul and R&B touches into their sound. Unfortunately, it’s rendered near unlistenable for me by The Rev himself. For some reason, he’s turned his singing voice into an over accentuated drawl. It’s bizarre because I’ve really liked their last couple of albums and his voice was absolutely fine. I’m all for local accents in music, but his voice is just really grating; he sounds like someone doing a caricatured piss-take of Alex Turner.
As always, you can read the album and tunes of the week reviews below and listen along via the playlist for half an hour of the week’s best new music.
Album of the week
The Dream Machine – Thank God! It’s The Dream Machine
I talked about the imagined extended Scouse Psych universe in my James Redmond review last week, 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 to make up a debut album. But The Dream Machine seem to be a band that are always pushing forward and looking to what comes next. Although, saying that, 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. But 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). I’d class it as 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 kind of wild-eyed youthfulness fuelling a lot of the songs, but then there’s something very classic about the songwriting, like there’s a wise and weary old storyteller narrating these tales. And there’s a timelessness across 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 this week 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.
Best tunes: Children, My England. Sweet Mary. This Time Around.
Tunes of the week
BECAH – Freak
This is the title track and standout from the debut EP of Northern Irish songwriter, BECAH. This is kind of like if Lorde had written Radiohead’s Creep. Her voice recalls the New Zealand songwriter, and the song has similar themes to Creep, reflecting on self-deprecation and self-doubt.
The song begins with a wall of noise and is drenched in fuzz throughout. But it’s filled with subtle melodies breaking through. And despite the slightly introverted and depressing lyrical content, the end result is strangely uplifting. Like it’s saying, after all, these kind of anxieties are perfectly normal and relatable. Maybe not exactly something to celebrate, but something to write a cracking song about.
Beach House – American Daughter
When I think of dream pop I think of Beach House. I know they’re far from originators, but their 2010 album, Teen Dream, is pretty much the pinnacle of the genre for me. However, none of their subsequent music has had the same impact. It’s generally been decent to good, but also I’ve mostly completely forgot about it after listening. It’s just washed over me, as is the risk with the genre.
American Daughter is the highlight from their Become EP. It’s not exactly a return to form as they haven’t particularly been out of form, but it certainly feels closer to their best work. Partly that’s probably a result of the EP format being a much more digestible slice to take in the music and help the songs stick (basically this review is just another excuse for me to get in my ‘make shorter albums’ point).
Beach House; masters of their genre and this is them close to their best.
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