Fly I Will, Because I Can – My Favourite Things (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

If dream-pop is a genre built from musical soundscaping and layers of sonic textures, My Favourite Things sonorous pop seems built upon the dreams themselves. It is an album forged of lullabies and half-forgotten memory, of hazy nostalgia and imaginary friends; nothing less than a portal between the adventures of childhood reality and the fantasy realms that they represented in your own mind.

Musically what seems to make this a dreamy pop album rather than a dream-pop album in the generic sense, is the way it is woven together. Rather than take a few standard building blocks and manipulate them through the possibilities of studio technology to create their finished sounds, My Favourite Things seem to use a much wider initial musical palette, create myriad finished sounds first before weaving them together. Perhaps it is the difference between printing a design on a woven rug and actually weaving that design from as you go,  one acoustic thread at a time.

Because of this the album continues to unravel more and more musical secrets with every listen as you slowly appreciate the complex nature of their sonic weave. It reveals brooding cellos and angelic harps, resonant accordions and chiming glockenspiels and all manner of exotic instruments alongside the more expected shimmering guitar patterns and pulsing bass lines.

My Favourite Things use sounds in the way that watercolour painters use colour, sparingly, gently blending one musical hue with another, merging them together often by washing them out and just as often leaving space so that a blank canvas of atmosphere and expectation sits in their place.

If you miss albums full of innocence and music woven from lost summers, fairground wonderment, the power of dreams and fairy-tale expectations, then this is certainly the album for you.