Dream Diary is the album Jeremy Jay has been trying to make since he first started out as a troubadour ragamuffin of the subconscious, a few brief years ago. If it just misses being the statement of purpose it could have been, and ends up a notch below the more contained visions he’s unleashed in the intervening years, that’s because Jay has already so thoroughly diarized his dreams. He does the same for an expansive 44 minutes on Dream Diary (a good ten minutes longer than past albums) and suggests plenty of new directions amidst elaborations on past themes, but the extra minutes eventually sacrifice the purity of form that all short albums have by default. Somehow, there’s a bit less of it to get lost inside.
Which is not to say Dream Diary lacks an overall design, at least an emotional one. It starts off with four tempestuous minor-key songs that build on the full-band sound that emerged magnificently on last year’s Splash, with clean amplified guitar and twinkling piano buoyed occasionally by the soft, barely contoured synths of 2009’s Slow Dance. Jay is a strummer of great intensity, but I think it requires some extended attentive listening to hear the unaccountable heaviness of his playing, muted scratching between full blooms of pure, unchased electric guitar.
The last of Dream Diary’s opening somber-cum-transcendent quartet, “Secret Sounds,” ends in a sort of stark shoegaze achieved with a minimum of pedals. The relief that comes with the breezy trio that follows is so striking that one gets an immediate sense of the album’s emotional structure and its governance by cardinal humors, Black Bile giving way to Blood or vice versa. Sometimes that formula is replicated in miniature within individual songs; whimsical “In the Times” threatens to whirl away into deluded fantasy, but even it ends up grounded by vivid, sleepless guitar. “Shayla,” a rare third-person account from a typically first-person (singular and plural) songwriter, is so far Jay’s clearest and most beautiful expression of his favorite storyline: factory worker Shayla runs away in search of “some subtle entity, some cosmic energy.” If she isn’t as vividly described as Lucinda Williams’ Sylvia (from the similarly myth-making “The Night’s Too Long”), it’s because Jay wants as much as ever to luxuriate in mystery. “The Days of Casting Clouds Away,” the apex of Jay’s amorous, courageous mid-album humor, beguiles with its spacious, central piano melody (in the manner of Splash standout “Just Dial My Number”) while its syncopation and breezy rhythm suggest a bold, fresh sense of romance, learned from the Swedes, perhaps, or Jens Lekman in particular.
Lyrically, the album finds Jay in his reliable idealized street poetry mode, ranging from the surprising “defecating on the murals of prophesizing dreams” in “It’s Just A Walk In The Park” to a more ordinary “smoking cigarettes after dark” in “Dream Diary Kids.” Those dream diary kids have cropped up in his songs before, and they seem synonymous with the street kid “jaguars” he told us so much about on Splash. I still can’t quite tell if Jay is a talented autobiographer of his own jaguar life or a man of impossible longings transmuted into art. These two Jays exist side-by-side throughout Dream Diary, most tellingly in the bipartite structure of “It’s Just A Walk In The Park” and its ghostly point of transference, when dreams seem to edge over into something more real and the guitar crackles to life. The true Jeremy Jay must live there, at the ethereal way station.
UPDATE: Well, “Shayla” is a Blondie song, of course, but Jay passes it off so convincingly as his own that you’ll probably be fooled.
