Ex-Slowdrive Led Band Tries To Find New Ground But Stumbles Along The Way

Its six degrees of musical separation: Dreamend is primarily the brain-child of Brian Graveface (yes, that’s the name he chose), who released albums under the same moniker: Graveface Records, which has published releases by the likes of Monster Movie, of which two members were formerly a part of the legendary shoegaze group, Slowdive. You follow? So, clearly, Graveface has an ear for talent, but does he have the creative gusto to match reverb with the best of them?

Like a swell of saccharine ambient chords, swirling as a translucent tornado in slow motion alongside a rapid bypassing backdrop is ‘Last Night on Feather River’ - the lush introduction to Dreamend’s The Long Forgotten Friend. Even the crashing waves of drums and cavernous slide guitar on ‘If Only for a Day’ continue to carry high aspirations for the album. Unfortunately, this feeling is gradually widdled away as the album progresses. The folk arrangements that punctuate half of the album tend to sour the sweet all too quickly and displace the otherwise tethered yearning guitar and washes of deep percussion. Graveface can’t be faulted for his attempt to introduce something novel into the strained shoegaze formula, but at the same time, on The Long Forgotten Friend it feels like these very grass root inclinations are only half of a step in an interesting direction and fall uninspired. Look no further than the sparse and scattered instrumental ‘Fourth of July at the Asylum’ and the tortured death rattle of ‘Deathwatch Carnival’.

A conflicting mar when in essence the alternation between vocal songs and instrumentals gives The Long Forgotten Friend a genuine rhythm. If not for the inclusion of drab pedantic moments, and the window dressing of folk instrumentation, the album might have taken a wholly dynamic direction. As it stands, however, The Long Forgotten Friend is merely an artificially flavored experience.

Michael Tenzer