After a while in the wilderness, Alt-J have returned with their fourth studio record, The Dream. It arrives as pure Alt-J – you can hear moments of unfiltered true life; vox-pops of lead singer Joe Newman’s wife create a personal ending to ‘Get Better’; whilst in the final track, ‘Powders’, echoes of teenage house parties create a quasi-cinematic landscape for an exploration of young love. The record reverberates with the soulful musicality that made the Leeds band so intriguing, mixing intense fictional stories and some of the trio’s most personal moments to date.
Take the contrast between ‘U&ME’ and ‘Happier When You’re Gone’. The former is a bright anthem, recounting Newman’s experience backstage at a festival in Sydney; there’s a school choir providing backing vocals, a brilliant, crunchy guitar B-section, and the group’s answer to Grease: as they outlined on their newsletter: “It’s quite simply a song about good times in the summer sun – too good perhaps -”; the balance between enjoyment and excess is a problem left for the listener to solve.
Meanwhile, away from the personal comes the latter track, a response to the Hendrix classic ‘Hey Joe’; as the band’s Spotify storyline explains, “it takes the woman’s perspective, and questions the man’s behaviour, rather than vice versa.” In the Hendrix track, an observer asks Joe where’s he’s going, only for him to answer that, with gun in hand, ‘I’m goin’ down to shoot my old lady/You know I caught her messin’ ’round with another man, yeah’ – he then commits the crime, and then is left on the run. Newman’s lyrics provide the woman a voice to admit that she’s ‘happier when you’re gone’, freed from the deeply abusive demands of her son, Joe, to stay with his father in an unhappy marriage.
The band also provides unfiltered prog-rock experiments. The opening track, ‘Bane’, is a collage of soundscapes, ‘Philadelphia’ is described as a paean to another similarly experimental group, The Beatles, creators of intriguing concoctions of orchestral prog-rock (e.g. ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Revolution No.9’). Alt-J succeed impressively in this task;; the eponymous ‘Philadelphia’ lyric is performed with brim-bursting vibrato by soprano Christie Valeriano; strings provide the latter part of the track with a sense of innate calm which empowers with the angst of the lyrics, narrating a story how the final moments of death have clashing emotions of innate powerlessness but also inner peace.
The record has moments where the band completely strips back the synth layers which pumped through their previous LP, RELAXER. A case in point is the album’s second single, ‘Get Better’, released last autumn as a musical observation of the personal struggles of the pandemic. Lead singer Joe Newman, who wrote the track, described it as “emotionally the most honest song I’ve written”, as previous lyrics he had written for his partner, Darcy, in 2018 were provided added weight by the pandemic and gave him “a new sense of responsibility as a lyricist.”. Hence, the lyrics touch on the moments of everyday life, such as ‘your Nutella, I’ll keep it in the cellar/ You were always a fan of that spread’. Sometimes there’s no need for exquisite imagery; mundane details can be the most emotionally impactful.
Equally as sparse is ‘Walk A Mile’, which opens with a barbershop quartet formed of Newman, fellow member Gus, and two of their school friends; described by the band as ‘the most dreamlike’ song on the record, it then develops into a cool-jazz-esque semi-acoustic waltz, as Newman sometimes croons, sometimes sighs four repeated lines of vocal lyrics. It sounds like clouds floating through the sky, the perfect soundtrack to a panoramic shot on an Attenborough documentary. Choral interludes are also included, harking back to the stunning vocal masterpieces in their debut record, An Awesome Wave.
Yet, that’s not to say there are no beats whatsoever. Following this moment of calmness, the band provide a hymn of devotion to house in ‘Chicago’, named after the genre’s American birthplace. There’s an edginess to this track through a continual bass drum heartbeat, as the instrumentals change from strings to oscillating piano chords, whilst they eschew any sense of a singular drop. Instead, there’s gradual waves of deeper house to lighter, sparser dance. ‘Losing My Mind’, meanwhile, builds up towards a supposed drop, building the layers of synths, guitars and beats underneath a crescendoing vocal; yet, instead of delivering a true ‘drop’, the record just ends – it’s a clever undercutting of expectations.
The Dream is another excellent record by the Leeds band, and, I’d say, their best since their debut. It unites all the elements of what has made Alt-J so successful over the past decade-and-a-half: stretching creative boundaries, immersing themselves in music history, and thinking deeply about how the listener experiences the track, whether that be providing a second side to a Hendrix story or ruminating on the personal struggles of the pandemic.
Words by Matthew Prudham
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