If the hymnal and heartfelt “Heaven Sent” is not the most stunningly glorious song you have heard in a long time, then you need to play it again and again until it has worked its magic on you. It sits somewhere between a chiming, minimalist, dream pop masterpiece and an almost religious experience, or at least the soundtrack to one, a delicate dance of human emotion and ethereal sonics. Any tag you care to give it from the normal musical lexicon seems, at best, woefully inadequate.
“Whiter Light,” by contrast, is groove-driven and energized; if the first song was all about the beatific, this is about the beat, a blend of accessibility and sophistication in the same way that the early work of Talk Talk was able to conform to the pop norms of its time and yet offer something so much more astute and artistic.
And for all this talk of dream-pop and the like, “I Could See The World” sees Bleach Dreamer push into somewhere more rock-oriented, but somewhere far beyond the genre’s cliche, and the sort of rock that beats with a soul heart and moves at a pop pace, and which is ornate and artisting, poised and paced rather than just merely noisy!
Surrender rounds off with “Jennifur,” which seems to sit somewhere between US west coast bliss and UK’s 80’s new pop and a more up-to-date take on shoegaze, although a less dense take on the genre’s core sound. The result is a song that is as accessible as it is artful, which is big and indeed clever, but which also sits just far enough to the left of the usual commercial path to keep the discerning music fan happy. Well, more than happy.
The trade-off of this latest EP from Bleach Dreamer, and indeed what makes all his music so great, is this balance of adherence to the pop-rock template and the ability to mess it up just enough to make things unexpected, unsecondguessable and unique. And Surrender is all those things….and more.
