Compulsion Songs – The Lucid Dream (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Bands that challenge me as a writer are always those I look forward too the most. Where is the fun in trying to find new ways of describing a band who are ripping off something you failed to get excited about 5 years ago when you can try to put into words music that really is striding into new, greener musical pastures? The Lucid Dream is just such a band.

And if it is a challenge to find ways of pinning down the myriad of shifting sounds that they weave together to create their individual albums, it is also fitting that haven woven such vivid colours on one album, the next will always see them working with intricate and often unexpected new patterns.

It says something about a band who even on CD divide their album into side A and side B and then present only 7 songs ranging from under 2 minutes to over 11. Certainly they work in a way that has no truck with fashion or mainstream conformity.

It is no co-incidence that this 3^rd album has the media taste makers and musical scribblers of note falling over themselves to applaud their music. Their ability to create walls of sound, which somehow sound sonorous and hazy, jangling post punk lullabies that descend into post-rock soundscapes and even dub grooves, wrapped in shoegaze lullabies mark them out to be one of the most inventive bands working today.