Aaron Dilloway, "Bad Dreams"

Forgive me for not being excited that one of the Wolf Eyes guys has another record out. It'd be a surprise if one of them, or Wolf Eyes themselves, didn't have a record out once every month or two.  While Bad Dreams is not one of those must-have records for mad collectors and noise lovers everywhere, it is a good piece of quiet noise that refuses to enter the "sounds like everyone else making annoying music" field.

PACrec

Dilloway presents four untitled tracks, each of them densely-layered works which focus on one or two central themes and runs with them. Undeniably analogue and mostly generic in their delivery, there's nothing special about any of the tracks. Sometimes rhythm of a very shadowed sort propels the songs along and, at other times, there's just a lot of machine noise screaming out of the speakers, sounding like the all too typical malfunction. Unsurprisingly it's loud and there's a good deal of fun sounds to be found, but after a while it's hard not to think that this is just more of the same.

What saves Bad Dreams from the fate of sounding repetitive is that the relatively short tracks that surround the massive 25 minute piece in the middle have enough variation in them to warrant some repeated listens. The hazardous waste, wind-swept desert feel of the album lives up to its title and makes for some fairly imaginative trips down ambivalent lane, but it fails to sound like anything that I haven't heard from someone else. Most appallingly, Bad Dreams is a record I can ignore at will.

The second, untitled track starts off nicely but then dissolves into a series of ambient noise sections that relies mostly on metallic buzz and rather dreary noise pulses that do nothing more than draw out its already epic length. There are some psychotic episodes placed throughout the disc and, on the whole, the album isn't terrible because the source material isn't bad, Dilloway simply fails to use the source materials in any way that makes me want to hear the album more than a few times.

I suppose I could put this on if I wanted some sounds to listen to in the background while performing day to day tasks. I might even be able to go to sleep to it, but I'm not compelled to give it too much of my attention.

samples:

• Bad Dreams, track 1
• Bad Dreams, track 2
• Bad Dreams, track 4