Dreamend - "As If By Ghosts..."
(Graveface Records 2004, grave010)
Dreamend - "As If By Ghosts..."
(Graveface Records 2004, grave010)
From Aural Innovations #29 (October 2004)
Difficult to adequately categorize, Dreamend play an intriguing mixture of conventional rock with ringing melodicism and more thrashy minimalist-inspired noise rock. Some points of reference here might be the early Jesus and Mary Chain or perhaps a less celestial Cocteau Twins minus the insanely beautiful vocals of Elizabeth Fraser; Dreamend, however, clearly has articulated a sound all its own on As If by Ghosts... Songs like "The Almighty", "Murmur" and "Four Days in May" provide a paradigm for the Dreamend sound: long, atmospheric sections of ethereal guitar arpeggios and chiming percussion that suddenly explode into whirlwinds of crashing drums and heavily distorted axe-grinding. "The Old House: Its Occupants" is almost anthemic in design, conjuring up wide open Midwestern spaces with its ambient texture of multilayered guitars, each tastefully saturated with different parameters of distortion, delay and chorus. Though there are vocals throughout most of the pieces, As If by Ghosts... shimmers with aura of an instrumental work. Cinematic in scope and elegiac in mood, As If by Ghosts... leaves the listener with a sense of both longing and regret, as if memories of lost dreams have been dredged up from the dead, quiet past. Dreamend has forged a curious path for itself, and it’ll be interesting to see where they go from here.
For more information you can visit the Dreamend web site at: http://www.dreamend.com.
Email at: mail@dreamend.com.
Contact via snail mail c/o Graveface Records; PO Box 57308; Chicago, IL 60657.
Reviewed by Charles Van de Kree