Artist: Dredg
Label: Superball Music
Released: year
Length: 41:30
Rating: 3/5
Dredg’s fifth studio album brings a few changes to the band’s musical direction, and in the medium term they could cut both ways. Right up to and including “El Cielo”, some people kept trying to pin the “best Tool imitators” label on this band. After that record they moved away from it, both in style and sound, and boldly kept building on their own artistic identity. “Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion” was a provocative and thoroughly adventurous step forward, one that oozed inspiration and expressive insight. It blended progressive rock with a modern alt rock/indie rock sensibility! It came across as art rock and was special in every way. You got the feeling that Dredg had defined their sound there and would be polishing it in that vein for years to come.
But “Chuckles And Mr. Squeezy” delivers a proper little shock therapy for the band’s loyal followers. On the new album, Dredg explore the musical dimensions of electro indie rock, buddying up with dreamy ambient. That’s dictated first and foremost by the production, which creates a gently shimmering contrast of collages: ambient retro “eighties” synth keyboards, simple, trivially pegged-down rhythms, and calm, slow to mid-tempo pacing. On top of it all, Gavin Hayes’ melancholic vocal gains a dreamy theatricality and sounds downright “spacey”, alien, detached. The placement of the guitar is interesting. It sticks to clean, organic sounds, with no pretentious moves that would kick up a noisy rumble. The guitar is dialed in the mix and pushed to the background, so at times it can even sound like optional extra filler (opening track Another Tribe, which actually gives away the point of the whole album, The Rent).
There are eleven tracks, and despite the surprising leap to a new sonic direction, Dredg still come across as convincing, imaginative and fresh in how they put their ideas across. The overall feeling as you make your way through the album is, broadly, truly dreamy, at times even transcendental. Even the second track, Upon Returning, where the guitar bursts out with a few more decibels and which is the loudest moment on the album, doesn’t manage to dispel the general sense of serenity the new record carries.
Even though the album is a new turn in their career, the songs, in their sophistication and perhaps not even deliberate “softness”, confirm the remarkable flexibility and artistic understanding of musicians that simply comes with years of experience. One of those impressive high points is the sculpted little indie rock tune Somebody Is Laughing, which, in the compactness of its verse-chorus pairing and its infectious melody, carries a touch of “Coldplay-ness” (the chorus and the guitar phrase in the transition).
Remember that magical synthesis of “post punk” and “new wave”? The track Down Withouth A Fight is the album’s most impressive song. It takes us straight back to the eighties with its mix of warm bass lines and retro synth nostalgia. The vocal lines recall The Smiths in the way the melodies are led, but if we carefully weigh the fact that it’s 2011, we’d be less likely to miss the mark by throwing in one of the Gorilazz songs at this point on the album. A wisely channeled musical legacy, carried into a new era. Carved into the core of a soft-sounding indie electro rock track for trendy indie kids. The ballad The Ornament continues the album’s progress with that same softness. With the added acoustic guitar ornaments, it leaves behind a piercing quip of a fashionable Duran Duran ballad, one that tries to replicate the Duran Duran little hit Ordinary World. Then there’s The Thought Of Losing You. This is another more impressive moment on the album, born for radio rotation thanks to the polished, clean melodic lines of the chorus. Much like Somebody Is Laughing.
Still, the album wobbles in quality and loses interest toward the end, when Kalathat, Sun Goes Down and the almost “country-ish” Where I’ll End Up follow one another. Yep. You won’t believe it! Even that’s possible with Dredg. The album closes with the imaginative, dark Before It Began. Most of the melody comes from the double bass, driven by a borrowed Latin beat. The melody pulls toward something that might have crawled out of the mind of Gilberto Gil… sorry, Gilbert Getz. A thoroughly successful experiment, the kind the new album otherwise lacks. A welcome change of pace right at the end! A flamenco guitar could slip into its melody with ease.
Dredg have drastically washed their sound clean. They seem far away, as if they’d wandered off into another galaxy for a moment and offered up barely three quarters of an hour of dreamy, easygoing offshoots of a newly unpretentious rock, presenting the band in a light we haven’t seen them in before. Not just through the moods, which are deepened by the dark, dramatic atmosphere running through the album, but through the lead vocal too. Fans surely won’t be thrilled with the new direction, since it shows the band in a less interesting artistic light. The band obviously wanted to deliver a different album, which is why they also chose a different approach to the sound production. Let’s hope it’s just a passing whim and that Dredg soon return to deepening the artistic reach established by the previous album. This time around, fans will be dancing to softer notes, and the band deserves a whisper that the “less is more” rule doesn’t always hit home convincingly enough.
Lineup
Gavin Hayes – vocals, slide guitar, guitar
Mark Engles – guitar, backing vocals
Drew Roulette – bass guitar, synthesizer
Dino Campanella – drums, piano, organ
Production
Dan the Automator
Track list
1. Another Tribe (3:46)
2. Upon Returning (3:51)
3. The Tent (4:46)
4. Somebody is Laughing (3:31)
5. Down Without a Fight (3:51)
6. The Ornament (4:06)
7. The Thought of Losing You (3:34)
8. Kalathat (3:23)
9. Sun Goes Down (3:48)
10. Where I’ll End Up (3:56)
11. Before it Began (2:58)
