Dream Cave

In the preamble to my interview with bass player Jeremy Kelshaw in July, I mentioned that Cloud Control is a band whose music is very, very hard to pin down. If anything, Dream Cave further complicates the matter, adding electronic beats to the psychadelica-infused alt-rock found on their 2011 debut, Bliss Release. Far from simply ticking the boxes on this follow-up, Cloud Control have covered a vast expanse of sounds – Kelshaw called it “going down different roads” – and emerged with an album that’s striking in its scope.

The band certainly makes these intentions clear in the album’s opening salvo. ‘Scream Rave’, with its Technicolor wails and heavy hand-claps, acts as a vibrant preview of what’s to come. First single ‘Dojo Rising’ and the stand-out chorus of ‘Scar’ straddle conventional guitar riffs and electronic loops without muddying either sound, playing out like a mellow Sydney beach scene interspersed with neon lights and laser beams. It’s an approach that’s utterly of-the-moment, and Cloud Control execute it so well throughout this album.

The soft synthesisers of these early tracks soon make way for the gleeful power chords of ‘Happy Birthday’ and thumping rhythms of ‘Island Living’ as lead singer Alister Wright growls and yelps his way through the swaying backdrops around him. Sharing the vocal responsibility this time around is Heidi Lenffer, whose soprano lends a startling clarity to the heart of this album amid a series of duelling instruments. Happily, both vocalists strike a balance between cutting through the medley and letting Barny Barnicott’s celestial production take centre stage; ‘The Smoke, The Feeling’ adds a wash of trippy vocal effects to the mix, while ‘Moonrabbit’ wraps Lenffer’s voice in a warm blanket of woozy 70s-style group harmonies.

There’s no rigid theme to tie this album together, per se, but that’s part of its off-kilter charm.”

There’s no rigid theme to tie these soundscapes together, per se, but that’s part of this album’s off-kilter charm. The lyrical content, like the melodies beneath it, shifts from muted solemnity to surreal hippy musings in a single stroke. “I want to see mushroom clouds on a white sea,” sings Wright on ‘Ice Age Heatwave’, presenting painfully dark undertones with an inimitably breezy delivery. There’s a duality here that’s tidily summed up on the resounding refrain of ‘Dojo Rising’: “Give it to me easy; give it to me hard.”

For some critics, this thematic hyperactivity unravels Dream Cave as a unit. The trip-hop effects of ‘Tombstone’ arguably act as a tonal hiccup in the closing stages of this album, although you suspect that this is part of the plan for a band which thrives off of the unexpected and the awkward. The drips of water which grace the album’s closing seconds serve as a final reminder that much of this album was recorded in a cave deep in the English countryside, but vivid splashes of electronica colour the edges of this record so neatly that they lift these subterranean sounds into the stratosphere.

You have to hand it to Cloud Control: creating an album that strolls confidently through the conventions of multiple genres while retaining the distinctly characteristic feel forged by the mono recordings of Bliss Release is an impressively ambitious undertaking. Even more impressive, though, is just how well they’ve pulled it off.

Similar To: Stornoway, The Boat People

MP3: ‘Scar’, ‘Dojo Rising’