I remember musing on the same question when I found dramamine’s previous album, When The Time Comes under my pen; where do the worlds of dream-pop and shoegaze find common ground? If the former opts for the airy and ethereal, the charming and the chiming, the latter, denser, rock-infused walls of sound, then in Heights Lake we have music made in that liminal space, that sector of the Venn diagram where all these things are possible.
If “Dearly Beloved” opens the album with dreamscaping, folk-infused sounds, a drifting and dark take on acoustica, a song that gathers all manner of textures and sonic layers around it as it goes, then “Signs” shows itself to be firmly on the other side of the divide, echoing the likes of Ride’s heavenly haze or My Bloody Valentines willfully obscured beauty.
And so, we travel through the world of melody and mystique that the band has cocooned itself in, we navigate between these extremes, one tempered by the other, though occasionally reveling in the subtlety or searing crescendos that emerge as the balance creatively shifts.
Songs such as “Let Go” slow-burn their way from one side of the divide to the other, “I’m Gone” feels almost like a conventional pop song, though something too beautiful for that shallow and sordid world, and “Meet You There”, which rounds the album off, seems to contain something of all the shifting moods that this album takes in.
The most surprising thing about this astonishing album is that it is all the work of just one exceptionally talented man. Pete Pom, thank you for bringing so much beauty to our dark world.
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