A Shoreline Dream – Recollections of Memory

Album Reviews • Monday February 2nd, 2009 • 9:14 am

A Shoreline Dream is one of those unique bands that forces you to look at their music in a different way. Are you listening to a space rock jam band or a group of guitar freaks who don’t like to sing intelligibly? Are they a shoegazing band or are their tracks swirling enough to transcend that moniker? And what do you do with the precious snippets of lyrics you actually can understand on this record?

Loads of questions. Fortunately there are plenty of answers.

Their latest LP, Recollections of Memory, is exactly forty minutes of some of the most epic soundscapes ever recorded, and from all appearances any sound that shows up on the record is a form of expression even if it’s not in some easily definable term like English. There are plenty of stellar moments on this record which are reminiscent of The Verve’s A Storm in Heaven and Sharks & Sailors recent effort Builds Brand New.

Like any band that can be even remotely associated with the space rock or shoegaze sounds, A Shoreline Dream loves and very heavily relies on their guitars to help set moods and tell stories. Erik Jeffries and singer Ryan Policky combine their efforts to send musical notes in all directions, colliding with each other as they reverberate and head for the heavens. Indeed some of the tunes themselves sound as though they were created for the purpose of communicating something otherworldly which they cannot find the right words for.

The wall of sound that this band creates is hypnotic and when Policky (and Sean Merrell on Mid Decembers”) adds his vocals, they augment the sound. Some people complain about music where the words cannot be understood or the meanings cannot be deciphered, but sometimes there are things that simply cannot be understood by others, cries which cannot be made anymore intelligible to the people listening. In some sense that is what the singing sounds like on this album. The soaring sound of the words is meant to connect with the music and somehow reach a listener in ways that words cannot. This effect is downright chilling in its execution on this record.

This album is nothing short of stunning. The beautiful sounds, the ethereal vocals, the rhythms, the speeds, the tones…everything about this record is electrifying.

Tagged as: Rock