A Shoreline Dream

Recollections of Memory

(Latenight Weeknight)

Record Review by Marcel Feldmar

The music starts playing, and instantly it feels like you are miles above everything, spaced out in a private plane and drifting, flying, floating through clouds. While much of the sounds and visions moving through here can be pegged as dream pop, post rock, shoegaze, what have you, there is also a stretching out towards some mellow goth moments, touches of The Cure drifting across the waves of clouds (falling somewhere between Faith and Disintegration). The beats hit heavy and hard, pushing like rolling thunder, but the wide sweeping sheets of guitars and keyboards cover it all with some blue-tinted Slowdive glare.

This Denver band has been pulsating out with sound, combining genres and creating new ones, since probably around 2005, and since then, they’ve found a fan, a friend, and a collaborator in musician / producer Ulrich Schnauss, who features on three of this album's ten songs. Perhaps he’s the one helping the Shoreline find the Dream. Touches and sparkles of some distant Cocteau Twin whirlpool splash upon the chords and structures, and sometimes there are voices, but the rare vocals always move in time, in place, with the surrounding songs. Another instrument to guide your dreams. This band has also found some help with the mastering and mixing side of things with Kramer (Galaxie 500, Low, and many more).

I think, listening to this band, that I am seriously going to have to reconsider my gratuitous use of the term shoegaze. I’m just not liking that anymore, the definition has lost its way, and I need to find a new one. I can sometimes place the sounds of other bands together to find something similar, but that might be something that’s hitting my ears only, like if I said that A Shoreline Dream has moments where they sound like the Appleseed Cast stretched out across a Codeine song, would anyone else get it?

The songs shift and move and mutate out of each other, from and for each other. “The Missing” is deep, dark, and dirty, with a highway driving energy, while the next song “Infusion” slips out with a dusty gypsy melody, and I can feel the sunset. “Mid Decembers” hits with a light jazz backdrop, pulled out into space by the angstful shimmer of guitars, and the last song, “Pasadena”, rolls out with lush and aching energy, building up and letting go and fading into an ocean of static. Every song has its own voice, its own story to tell, but the album holds every story together in a wrapped ribbon of sound and beauty.