Dreampop is a broad term, one that can encompass everything from the minimal ambience to the denser sounds that blur the line with its shoegazing neighbor. But it generally embraces creative elements and sonic choices that make it fluid and cinematic, lush and ethereal. And while Surface with a Smile, the latest album from Maven Grace, (nice pun, by the way), is all of those things, it also cleverly introduces something new – a beguiling angularity and slightly off-kilter sound. It is a supply and subtly used twist, but it does account for the wonderfully unpredictable and beautifully disarming nature of some of the songs found here.
Like the odd blend of heavenly haze and robotic rhythms of opener “No Music,” a sound that seems both dreamlike and tense in equal measure, which is a strange dance indeed. “Goodbye To All That” (which may or may not be a reference to Robert Graves autobiography, though I do hope so) ebbs and flows between almost cosmic, 60’s infused, psychedelic a cappella and drifting cinematics, and “Hail to The King” is lush and gently anthemic, feeling both futuristic and nostalgic at the same time.
Surface with a Smile is a wonderful blend of the familiar and the fresh, the graceful and the groove-driven. It combines neo-classical elegance with electro-sonic eloquence, evoking a wave of sounds from the past that merge with one possible future music, finding common ground in the present. Dream-pop it may be, but it is dream-pop steering towards a different destination, perhaps a whole new destiny.
Shouldn’t all genres be this adventurous?
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