The Daily Spin, November 27
Glass Animals | Dreamland
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: Dreamland (2020)
Artist: Glass Animals
Link:
For their third full-length album, Glass Animals strike at their most ambitious, with mixed results.
Known for their near-psychedelic jungle beats and hypnotically addictive production, as well as frontman Dave Bayley’s tantalizing falsetto, Dreamland embodies so much of what Glass Animals have set as their hallmark style while also attempting to move forward, especially in the wake of drummer Joe Seaward’s near-fatal accident a few years ago.
While ZABA was the thick and creeping danger of menacing shadows and How To Be A Human Being was a series of pastel-tinged vignettes, of love and loss and heartbreak, Dreamland is somewhere in between - at least, in theory. Those same bombastic drums and sneakily eerie production cues make a reappearance, but the vignettes and stories take on a decidedly more personal aura, for better and for worse.
There are moments where the band’s love for metaphor is to its detriment - ‘Melon and the Coconut’ lays particularly guilty as a song that winds up coming off nonsensical - not unlike ‘Pork Soda’, but lacking that powerful backing beat that makes it easy to stomach some of the more absurd couplets - but other times, it’s the best that the band has ever done - the deafening silence described by ‘It’s All So Incredibly Loud’ is this fantastic symphony of anxiety, three seconds stretched over five minutes, agonizing and anticipatory and utterly devastating no matter which way it goes.
There’s growth here, too - the introduction of strings and more sophisticated drum patterns shows throughout, because a ton of these songs get way more enjoyable to listen to, layered like a good Victoria sponge in ways that previous efforts missed at times. On the whole, thoroughly enjoyable, even if a few bites aren’t all the way baked through. That’s a handshake.
Rating: 9.1/10
Best Tracks: Helium; It’s All So Incredibly Loud; Dreamland
Worst Tracks: Melon and the Coconut; Tangerine