A Shoreline Dream

Slug-slow shoegaze augmented by Black Tambourine-esque vocals fighting through mighty cobwebs of reverb. This album would like to be some sort of meditation-class fractal-soundscape study, and is being marketed as such — from the CD cover to Latenight’s press blurbs (“a visual” blah blah blah “translated into an aural” blah blah blah). But the end product is a largely instrumental set of altie prayers mumbled at the lotus feet of Interpol, rarely deviating from 4/4 time into the legitimately abstract, and evoking clear imagery not of seascapes, hopes, or dreams but of pimpled art-clucks subjecting their chicks to never-ending private performances built on their unnerving obsessions with stillborn arpeggios. Sure, it’s experimental, but their cubicle-mates at work must have dreaded taking turns at the slimy Walkman to “scope out our latest, man.”