The most recent in an avalanche of new music taking a crack at resurrecting the dreamy, shoegazer pop of bands like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ride, Pluramon's Dreams Top Rock only distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack by not being quite as predictable. It helps that Marcus Schmickler has recruited Julee Cruise—the serene, childlike chanteuse of so many David Lynch soundtracks—to contribute vocals to the album. Julee's last album, the dreadful The Art of Being a Girl, was such a wasted opportunity that it's a pleasure to hear her placed in the hands of a producer who can wield her peculiar vocal talents properly.Karaoke Kalk
Schmickler has obviously schooled himself on Julee's best work, as tracks like "Flageolea" reproduce the languid jazz and lush pop sensibility of her classic Floating Into the Night album, which was produced by Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti. Schmickler comes from a background of post-techno Powerbook composition, so much of Dreams Top Rock's sonic complexity derives from the careful overlay of laptop-treated instruments, aligned to created a densely packed architecture of guitar noise, feedback and subtle digitalia. Many of the tracks float by on pacific washes of beatific guitar noise, noise that seems at once unstructured and complexly detailed. Pluramon's overuse of stereo effects and multi-tracking can seem at times like a parlor trick, and an unoriginal one at that, but the richly nuanced storm of hazy psychedelic fuzz was enough to keep me engaged for the album's entire length. The album also has its share of good songwriting, especially "Time For a Lie," which appears twice on the album in radically different mixes. "It's a beautiful time for a lie," Cruise repeats, her voice wistfully lilting at the end of every line, each breathy refrain sending out a comet trail of echoes and reverberations which accumulate over the length of the song, like Phil Spector's wall of sound as envisioned by Loveless-era Kevin Shields. The lovely "Noise Academy" creates a complicated symphony of mutated and reprocessed vocals and instruments that radiates along with the druggy, minor-key guitar melodies. Marcus Schmickler's exacting, overly clinical, and obsessive reenactment of his obvious influences may the album's weakest aspect, but paradoxically, it's also the same inspiration that keeps the album afloat on a distorted cushion of nebulous fragility. 
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