Monster movie + dreamend
12/22/2002
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Everything about this release points to a deep attention to detail from the wonderful cardboard packaging to the songs themselves. The opening two tracks from Clairerecords' Monster Movie are instantly engaging with Beautiful Arctic Star's shoegazing meets electronica murmurings and the lo-fi piano throb and lamenting harmonica blues of Nobody Sees sounding like an elegiac Badly Drawn Boy pop ballad. However both songs are overshadowed and overwhelmed slightly by what is to come in the form of Dreamend's magnificent trilogy entitled Elipsis.The sheer magnitude of the following twelve minutes is enough to blow you away. Dreamend is indeed an apposite description of their sound. The first part opens still in a fantasy world, slowly burning to a crashing midpoint of post-xylophonic-rock, with walls of fuzzy guitar nodding to bands like their US counterparts Melochrome. The second tranche is the hazy coming-to with everything slightly out of focus and blurred, but still waking up back to reality with thrashing guitar, a demolishing bass-line and drums flying around like bullets. The finale is an epic, gentle, swaying math-rock lullaby invigorating in all it's heartfelt warmth and pensive brooding. It's the part where you're still lying in bed and the sun has started creeping in your window, opening up the world outside. Like a truncated version of Godspeed! You Black Emperor they escalate through a catalogue of different emotions right the way through Ellipsis, which leaves the listener feeling that they have just witnessed something pretty special indeed.Michelle..."
Track Listings (5) - Disc #1