Australia based two piece, I Dream in Transit sent me their latest self released single about a year after I listened to their first Explosion single. Housed in a great chipboard matchbook style sleeve, they're continuing that intimate, slightly mysterious aesthetic with this linocut graphic black and white sleeve. From what I remember IDIT was a smoldering kind of dark pop. An extension of the shoegaze era, they're using all those defining elements in subtle understated ways...reminding me a lot of Rex or Codeine...but with a shimmery gleaming polish, keeping their distance a little and keeping their secrets close. You're going to have to really get to know them.
A-Side's "Absolute Peace" is a super stripped down track, at least when it comes to this kind of dense shoegaze almsot psych sound thanks to slow droning chimes and echo'd bouncy percussion marching away in a slow time signature. Flute style synth under heavy delay picks up the melody that the male vocal was up to previously. (No band members are named anywhere in their sparse Facebook bio). Determined bass isn't going to miss, plodding along in this concrete beat and those vocals are doubled with plenty of echo, and when that synth comes in, it's hitting heavenly chords like Disintegration's sort of mysterious gloom. Stumbling into a late night basement with The Velvet Underground playing in one corner and The Jesus and Mary Chain on the opposite side...at 17rpm, quietly.
I also love this understated drum machine beat happening underneath along with this spaced out, cavern sound, comes this thin metallic slapping under the haze. Snares bounce down with a two second delay, nothing lasts a second, it's like persistence of vision for your ears? Is that what this whole genre is about? Lyrically this is even going to that Cure place for me as well, but that's my favorite frame of reference...but this is the best use of the idea of a drone in modern songwriting...not just because it's the only one either, this one is going to stand the test. Truly haunting.
B-Side's "Night Dog" breaks up the channels into a tight tom loop on one side with bubbling water on the right. A barely audible organ tries to bring the two together but this is plain sparse. The vocals are clearer, but delivered so drawn out into almost vocal sounds, to try to remember where the beginning of this sentence even started is impossible, you get fragments one minute at a time. Female vocals far in the distance start up a sing song melody hardly there at all. They work in all dreams, nothing makes sense the first few times around. The loop disintegrates and live drums kick in just slightly faster with a big Roger Daltry kind of echo with that slow tempo. I never liked Pink Floyd, but maybe I just didn't like pink floyd people more...or my summer camp counselor who told us impressionable twelve year olds the story of the movie almost every night and made us promise to rent it as soon as we got home. Razors to eyebrows, a slow chime works in under the breathy transistor radio sounding ahhh's that are now swirling around. This is making me go off in tangents, but they have something realy nice here, a shoegaze style taken to a psych extreme. Hyptnotic and haunting with the lyrical content and big ideas to back it up.
Black vinyl, hand stamped inner label, lyrics on the back sleeve direct from the band, airmailed from Australia.
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