The internet has just lit up with the news of the debut full length album Visions from Dream Boat, released on the phenomenal Prague based AMDISCS label and available now. The label have become my highlight of the year, putting out incredible lo-fi yet hi-intensity EPs and albums that are either instantly addictive or provoke you into repeated listens that slowly crawl their way into your subconscious; the sound ranges across the current spectrum of beach-wave, witch house, hypnagogic pop and dark electronica, with a pool of artists drawn from all corners of the world. Highlights that will undoubtedly hit my end of year track and albums shortlists come from Daniel Radall, Ghost Animal, Railcars, Pink Priest, Pears, Table, Twilight Owls, Unouomedude and Tearist.
Amazingly they release many of their artist's albums for free as well as offering them in cd and cassette form, but as big a feature as I could write about AMDISCS, this is really about one of my current obsessions; Dream Boat.
Their album contains Your Beaches from the Fevers EP which, if you've heard it, should convince you enough to part with €8 for the digital download alone - one immense track of stuttering, drum-machine groove, of claustrophic breathless euphoria kept a teasingly thin distance from total peaking; a psychological landscape of Lynchian twists and sidesteps, of Hitchcockian thrill and suspense, yet somehow that track was no one off; this album is full of the same rippling, haunted aggression and wired primitive atmospheres that characterized all their previous eps. Kissing Collar clips along with a solemn bounce, Rosary is dragged and screwed lightly enough to retain full pop glamour yet distorted enough to fetishise it's more sensual features.
The artwork too, has lost the overt provocative sexuality that defined that Jane Birkin Fevers EP cover and the mirrored nudity of True Love; although they've kept it up with the current image they're using as their band photos, this cover brings a sinister creepy edge, a black outline and blurred centre much like the music itself, all hazy visioned with steely definition. One hallmark of their sound is the gritty synth tone deployed in many of the tracks, like a subduction zone around the impact of each beat it grinds into the foreground pulling at your ears and pricking up your senses like an organic klaxon pulsing out from the deep undergrowth of the occult subgenre in which they dwell; and, it has to be said, sounds fucking badass. Along with the SALEM's epic King Knight it will become one of the defining sounds of the year for me, for the witch house genre and judging from the reaction to the release of this album, many other people too. In tracks like No Air and Your Beaches, it ploughs a filthy furrow of noise straight down the lateral-lines, like a modern take on motorik, it's a distinctive pulse through the core of the tunes that draws the focus ofattention. Elsewhere, in Coals there's a tribal element that underscroes the sense of ritualistic primitivism in the sound, percussive drums drawn in tight circles, a clattering cacophany of ceremonial hedonism that takes over the body and leads from the outside in.
Order your copy HERE where they have 4 tracks to preview too.
All the previous ep's are still available as free downloads from AMDISCS from the following links:
Fevers EP
Dream Boat & True Love split
ARC & Dream Boat split
There's also a video to Kissing Collar directed by Kat Tedesco that is well worth disturbing your rods and cones with:
