Athens, Georgia space rock institution Pacific UV take a decided turn toward pop on fourth album After the Dream You Are Awake. Their 2012 long-player, Weekends, hinted at a move in this direction over its diverse set list, embracing mom...
Athens, Georgia space rock institution Pacific UV take a decided turn toward pop on fourth album After the Dream You Are Awake. Their 2012 long-player, Weekends, hinted at a move in this direction over its diverse set list, embracing moments of high-production melodramatic pop amidst its more dreamy instrumental pieces and sprawling space rock missions. The nine tracks here eschew the band’s more free-flowing forms for the most part, offering up a much more tightly focused look at the brittle electronic side of their work. Starting off with the blissfully melodic, midtempo bounce of “24 Frames,” the band melds the huge cinematic drums and synths of M83 with the narcotic chamber pop of Spiritualized, with…
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…vocalist Clay Jordan sounding like an even more subdued Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo. Songs like “Christine” and “I Wanna Be You” get even closer to Yo La Tengo’s smooth, lovelorn indie sound, but moments later, the flow is disrupted by the jarring electro of “Russians.” Laura Solomon’s smoky vocals are joined by robotic vocoder harmonies on this almost entirely electronic track, draining the more organic warmth set up by the first few songs. The mesh of styles is somewhat off-putting, but the electronics gradually merge with the chamber elements as the track listing goes on, mellowing over the slick and seductive “Wolves Again” and a puzzling cover of Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face.” While so much of the album is tightly wound electro-pop, some remnants of the past still remain. “Run” is a washed-out instrumental cloud of interlocking ambient synth loops with some soft field recordings and gentle bells rounding out the picture. Even though album standout “American Lovers” quickly builds into heavily sequenced keyboards and drum machines, dreamy atmospheric guitar lines hang on the electro-skeleton, highlighting the hooky and otherwise electronic chorus with a more human element. The struggle between the futuristic sounds and Pacific UV’s more natural dream state comes to characterize After the Dream You Are Awake. While the most aggressive electronic moments are also the weakest songs here, the merging of whispery pop and fully engaged electronic production is a huge success for a band whose output has been sleepier in the past, and points toward even more exciting developments in the future.
 via Mattters)
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