Dreamend - …As If By Ghosts

I didn’t need to buy this Dreamend album. I was browsing Discogs looking for So Many Dynamos CDs last year, and I found one that I wanted to buy, but I needed to buy some more CDs from the seller to hit the minimum amount for free shipping. The cover looked cool, so I took a chance on it. Didn’t look it up on Stereogum, didn’t give it a listen on Spotify, just bought it. It was only a couple dollars, so I figured it was worth the gamble (the other two albums I bought in that cart, The Loud Wars and Records for the Working Class No. 2, will definitely appear on this blog sooner or later).

…As If By Ghosts is packed pretty tightly for a post-rock album. 10 songs, 46 minutes, half instrumental, half murmuring. Bandleader (and possible sole contributor) Ryan Manon wastes little. Almost everything is in service of the vibe, and you can really feel the time and place where this was made. He’s living in the same world as Explosions in the Sky and Elephant 6 here, fellow Southerners and big-R Romantics who find it easier to paint worlds with their guitars and auxiliary percussion than it is to actually talk to people. Yes, there’s some Godspeed! You Black Emperor and Arcade Fire, some Montreal flavor here, but this is a Southern post-rock album through and through. I find it a little odd that they’re described as a shoegaze band some places on the internet - maybe on other records, but not here.

…As If By Ghosts establishes its core ingredients out of the gate. It opens with Manon singing about how difficult it is to say what he should to someone he loves on “Of Raven and Winds”. Manon’s vocals are plain and echoey, but packed with feeling. They have that Doug Yule power-through-meekness thing to them. When they drop out, the instrumentation kicks into high gear for an emotional The second track, “Ellipsis” shows what Dreamend can do without them. It’s probably the song most indebted to the clean-toned crescendos of early Explosions in the Sky, complete with glockenspiel and tremolo swells. “Four Days In May” is a dreamy contemporary folk song at its core, where the longing and love of old country ballads meets the intensity of 00s DIY recording.

“The Almighty” is a fun minor-key diversion from the path of the record thus far. The first half shows off the drummer’s post-hardcore chops amidst a whirlwind of fuzz bass and howling reverb, then the second half slips into a headbanging half-time section. “Murmur” is aptly named - I can hardly make out the lyrics, but the contours of the song are visible through the clouds. …As If By Ghosts can be inscrutable, but it knows what it’s about and smirks at you to try and figure it out. It teases the listener into feeling the highs and lows with it, and the answer is much simpler than it pretends. The disc itself was snugly insulated with a torn page from a book about William Godwin, for god’s sake. It’s pretentious as hell, but charmingly so.

“Can’t Take You” opens the B-side as “Of Raven & Winds” did the A-side, with a folk song on electric guitar, but this time it has the restraint to remain a folk song the whole way through. We get swingin’ banjo and slide guitar on the next song “Slide Song”, which feels simultaneously very Montreal and very Georgia. The la-la-la melody that closes it out is infectious. The remaining three songs flow smoothly into each other, all three brooding instrumentals, alternately serene and severe. Love is like that sometimes. This is versatile, affecting broken-heart music.

Let’s talk about this album art, since that’s what drew me to the album in the first place. Cardboard-chic seems to have been a big thing in the 00s. The front cover has a photo of two women at the beach, smiling coyly at the camera. Are they the subjects of distant love, like all the songs on the album? On the back of the photo, invisible to the listener unless you opened up the case and peeked into the pocket, is scribbled an ominous “you know”. After doing a little research, it seems like every CD case is different, with different photo-ephemera on every cover.

Like I wrote earlier, all of these things so strongly evoke the late-90s, early-00s self-serious crescendo-core post-rock scene from which it sprang, but it never falls victim to the worst tropes of that scene. Sure, the tremolo picking has spring reverb on it, and the drums are roomy and boxy, but I never sat there with my headphones on just waiting for the apex of the song like I do with some of those Bands Which Will Destroy You. There’s always something happening. There are no highs, just clarities - there are no lows, just refuges.

…As If By Ghosts by Dreamend is a good album, and I like it.