Breeze pop auteur
Joseph Stevens
has used his band
Peel Dream Magazine
to explore some of the more under-traveled waves of indie pop influence. The earliest
PDM
albums were rocking affairs with a strong resemblance to
Stereolab
at their most electric, softening significantly into Baroque orchestral pop along the lines of
Van Dyke Parks
and post-
Pet Sounds
Beach Boys
on 2022's
Pad
. The fourth album from the project,
Rose Main Reading Room
, further refines
Stevens
' loving tribute to these reference points, but also goes deeper into new influences which get hidden in the layers of subtle production on what amounts to an album of finely crafted headphone candy. The
Dots and Loops
-era
-styled chord progressions of opening track "Dawn" coast in on spirals of arpeggiating strings and woodwinds more akin to
Philip Glass
' most pop-friendly arrangements, with bells twinkling in a gentle rainstorm around vocalist
Olivia Babuka Black
's muted, low-key singing. The Baroque sound of
continues with the fluttering flutes of "Central Park West," the web of burbling woodwinds and exhaling strings on "Migratory Patterns," and the dreamy glockenspiel countermelodies of "Four Leaf Clover." In addition to the more switched-on upbeat rocking of "Lie in the Gutter," there's a fairly boldfaced homage to
Belle & Sebastian
on "I Wasn't Made for War," a song whose acoustic guitar strums and sweetly melancholic verses sound borrowed directly from
Tigermilk
. Perhaps the most interesting development on
is
's embrace of the highly obscure and short-lived intersection of indie pop and electronica as it happened in the late '90s. At that point, and with very little fanfare, bands like
Bowery Electric
,
Land of the Loops
Adventures in Stereo
, specific players on the
Darla Records
roster, and others all started experimenting with friendly drum'n'bass beats and scratchy drum samples, resulting in a blissed-out and bumbling type of electronic music worlds away from the all-night rave sounds they were attempting to re-create. It's a specific sound that's close to but not quite the same as the more sophisticated sounds
Air
and
Cornelius
were achieving around the same time.
and friends seem aware of this lesser-known detour in indie rock history, blending space age bachelor pad melodies with submerged breakbeats on "Wish You Well," and using blurting synth basslines and sunny drum loops on tracks like "Gems and Minerals."
's central ambition remains creating opulent pop on
, and the songwriting is beginning to rise to the level of intent and detail put into the meticulously cross-referenced arrangements, making it the band's best work to date and showing promise for the next chapter. ~ Fred Thomas