Menu

American Dreams

a1984297192_16

Lucy Liyou, “Dog Dreams (​개​꿈​)” (American Dreams, 2023)

,

This latest full-length from Lucy Liyou is described as a “rumination on the double-sidedness of trauma and love.” The title is a Korean idiom with multiple meanings (“could mean anything from fanciful daydreams to nightmarish terrors”) and was chosen very deliberately, as Liyou is fascinated by what our dream lives say about us and our subconscious desires. Interestingly, Dog Dreams is billed as only Liyou’s second album (she is quite a prolific artist), but apparently everything other than 2020’s Welfare is considered either an EP or a collaboration. In some ways, Dog Dreams feels like a logical evolution from that debut, but I was surprised to find that Liyou moved away from her text-to-speech narratives, as I previously thought that element was absolutely central to her aesthetic. In their place, however, are elusive Robert Ashley-esque dialogues of murmuring voices hovering at the edge of intelligibility. While I expected to miss the playfully dark humor of those robotic voices quite a lot (I found them very endearing), the newly tender and human voices fit the dreamlike beauty of Dog Dreams‘ three sound collages quite nicely.

Unsurprisingly, Dog Dreams has its roots in Liyou’s own recurring dreams, but it is also a dialogue of sorts with co-producer Nick Zanca, as the two artists first worked on the album separately before convening in Zanca’s studio to shape the final version. The opening title piece provides a fairly representative introduction to the album, as a melange of faint pops, hisses, and crackles slowly blossoms into a pleasantly flickering and psychotropic collage of tender piano melodies, water sounds, and sensuously hushed vocals. Interestingly, the aforementioned melange of strange sounds came from recordings of saliva (albeit “dilated and rendered unfamiliar through Zanca’s adroit mixing”), which is definitely not something that I would have guessed on my own. Characteristically, the vocals are the best part of the piece, as Liyou and Zanca’s voices enigmatically mingle, overlap, and harmonize in a fractured, shapeshifting dialogue. Uncharacteristically, however, “Dog Dreams” transforms into something resembling Xiu Xiu’s Jaime Stewart interpreting a tender R&B-tinged ballad from a Disney soundtrack. While I certainly did not see that curveball coming, it is very on-brand for Liyou, as she has always been an inventive magpie keen to assimilate any and all compelling sounds and ideas that bleed into her life.

The shorter second piece (“April in Paris”) is the album’s strongest, as Liyou blends together an abstract rendition of a “Vernon Duke jazz standard” with a narrative reflection on sexual assault. Despite the heavy subject matter, it is an absolutely gorgeous piece that feels like a series of evocative dissolving mirages that run the gamut from “sultry jazz fantasia” to “churning nightmare.” It may very well be my favorite piece that Liyou has ever recorded, but “Fold The Horse” ends the album with another gem, elegantly blurring the lines between “field recordings from a factory inside a snow globe” and “hypnosis session in the middle of an animated Disney forest full of cheerfully chirping birds.” Curiously, It climaxes with yet another R&B-inspired passage, which predictably wrong-footed me yet again. Those “bursting into song” moments tend to feel a bit out of place to me, which is my one caveat with this album, but the unusual seesawing between pop and surreal abstraction makes for compelling art regardless (dreams fundamentally follow their own logic, after all). In any case, this is an absolutely beautiful and unique album, as Liyou and Zanca crafted quite a sensuous, bittersweet, and immersive channeling of Liyou’s swirling subconscious. Moreover, there is enough mystery lurking in these diaristic dreamscapes to make me want to revisit them again and again to reveal fresh details and new shades of meaning. To paraphrase one of the album’s central samples (“the outer person isn’t necessarily always the inner person”), the immediately graspable elements of Dog Dreams are merely an entry point to its fathomless depths.

Listen here.

a1029114576_16

Kyle Kidd, “Soothsayer” (American Dreams, 2022)

,

This first solo album from queer, androgynous soul singer Kyle Kidd is an incredibly strong contender for best debut of the year, but he/she/they (Kidd embraces all pronounds) has been been steadily releasing great music for a while as part of Cleveland’s Mourning [A] BLKstar ensemble. Notably, however, Kidd’s past also includes a background in church choirs as well as a stint as an American Idol competitor. Normally learning about the latter would send me running in the opposite direction, but Kidd joins the exclusive pantheon of vocal virtuosos like Ian William Craig and Zola Jesus lured away from a conventional trajectory by a healthy passion for more underground sounds. That said, a decent amount of Soothsayer legitimately feels like it could have burned up the Soul/R&B charts if it had been released in the late ’70s and had a major label production team at the console. As time travel was not a viable option, Soothsayer instead found a home on the oft-stellar Chicago indie American Dreams and Kidd’s sensuous, hook-filled songs eschew the polished sheen of pop production for a hypnagogic veil of tape hiss and reverb (much to my delight, predictably).

The gospel-inspired opener “Salvation (Ode for Eunice)” is bit of a stylistic anomaly for the album, but the understated, minimal piano chords and subtle flourishes of jazz guitar beneath Kidd’s soulful, wailing vocals illustrate one of the more notable and consistent themes on Soothsayer: backing music that sounds like crackling rare grooves unearthed by a moodier, more libidinal Madlib. Consequently, I was quite surprised when I glanced at the album notes and saw the large cast of guest musicians involved, as it genuinely feels I am hearing appropriated unheard grooves from Larry Levan, Arthur Russell, or Ann Peebles’ backing band transformed into smoky, subtly psych-damaged Sade territory by a producer with a vision. The result does not exactly feel loop-based, but Kidd’s songs tend to be built from single-theme vamps, which is exactly the right move: just lay down a hot groove and give Kidd plenty of room to belt her heart out and a killer song is almost certain to result.

In general, the strongest songs on the album tend to be the more smoldering, sexy ones like “Glass Dance” (or smoldering, brooding ones like “Temple”). However, the album ends with a sublime left-field highlight in the form of “Dreama,” which hazily drifts along as a fantasia of rippling harp and a Satie-inspired flute hook. It almost calls to mind Nina Simone after a steady diet of Grouper and Benoit Pioulard albums, which is an unexpectedly wonderful niche that I had not previously encountered. Aside from perhaps the Sade-esque heartache of “Scars Alight” or the languorous sensuality of “Inside My Love,” the remaining songs do not match the heights of that trio of near-perfect delights, but that is only because they are a bit more improvisatory and insubstantial in a “lost Arthur Russell jam session” kind of way. Unsurprisingly, that has its own appeal and Kidd wisely avoids letting such pieces overstay their welcome. In fact, the whole album is over in roughly half an hour, which is exactly the right “leave ’em wanting more” length necessary to induce me to immediately start it all over again as soon as it ends.

Listen here.

a0449631399_16

claire rousay, “a softer focus” (American Dreams, 2021)

,

This latest release from the prolific claire rousay has been deservedly getting quite a lot of attention, as it can reasonably be called a creative breakthrough of sorts. At the very least, a softer focus documents an especially accessible and melodic strain of rousay’s singular (if understated) vision. Obviously, most of the credit for that goes to rousay herself, as her work has always been on a upward trajectory, but this album was also significantly influenced by the involvement of visual artist Dani Toral, who is the creative force behind the album’s non-musical content (cover art, videos, song titles, album title, etc.). 

While the artists’ two visions seamlessly combine beautifully into one, some of the best parts as a pure listening experience involve the participation of less-central contributors, as my favorite pieces are warmed by violin and cello accompaniment from a trio of guest musicians. While I have always found rousay’s work generally intriguing and unusually intimate, the more melodic and organic elements here definitely enhance her aesthetic wonderfully. This album genuinely feels like it is on a completely different level than most of rousay’s previous releases.

After a brief and enigmatic introduction that sounds like a dictaphone recording of someone moving around a room and using a typewriter, the album begins in earnest with the absolutely gorgeous “discrete (the market).” It is essentially a continuation of the sounds from the opening “preston ave,” but they are now joined by slow, beautiful drone swells and a shifting host of other elements (wind chimes, a tender piano melody, and an intensifying low-end surge). It evokes the sensation of blissfully lounging in an apartment on a perfect spring day while sunlight streams in, curtains gently sway, and sounds drift in from neighboring apartments and the street below. The following “peak chroma” is similarly excellent, as it feels like home videos of childhood vacations are flickering across a shimmering dronescape while an autotuned R&B jam plays on a fitfully operational radio. 

While “peak chroma” is ostensibly the album’s hot single since it has a video, the next two songs are every bit as good, which adds up to an impressive four-song run of near-perfection. I especially enjoy how “diluted dreams” sounds like a reprise of the heavenly “discrete (the market),” but with added playground sounds and the impressive aural illusion of making me feel like I am slowly submerging in a bathtub. I also greatly appreciate the honesty and simplicity of rousay’s overarching vision (using the mundane sounds of daily life as the building blocks for a deeper, more poignant whole), but it is the execution that makes this album such an immersive and wonderful delight, as the best moments feel like a warm and dreamlike fantasia of overlapping memories playing at different speeds. Rousay and Toral have done quite an impressive job of blurring the lines between sound art, visual art, poetry, drone, and pop in a pleasing and soulful way here, which is a definitely not a feat that many other artists could convincingly pull off so gracefully. I probably do not need to say this, but I will anyway: a softer focus is unquestionably destined to be all over “Best of 2021” end-of-year lists.

Samples can be found here.