Search - Soltero :: You're No Dream (Dig)

Best Album of 2008

Mike Smith | Albuquerque, NM | 07/11/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It's about halfway through 2008, and the music world this year has already seen the arrivals of a number of truly excellent albums--Portishead's "Third," Elbow's "The Seldom Seen Kid," and British Sea Power's "Do You Like Rock Music?", among others--but I would argue that there is one recent album that bests them all--that is more enlivening, more musically thrilling, and more perfectly formed than any other from 2008--and that that album is "You're No Dream," by Soltero.



I am in love with this album. Recorded almost entirely by Tim Howard, Soltero's wizard behind the curtain, on a spooky little eight-track, the album feels every bit as complex and summery as Soltero's 2005 classic "Hell Train," and yet every bit as intimate and ethereal as his 2004 "Tongues You Have Tied." There are even echoes here of Soltero's distant past--a snippet of a line from Howard's first pre-Soltero album "The Taco Cat Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing," and a comparably beautiful lo-fi quietude.



Fans of Soltero's earlier work will no doubt love this, but they shouldn't expect more of what they've heard before. It may not seem possible to anybody familiar with the masterpiece that is "Hell Train," but Howard has actually continued to grow as a songwriter--he has actually gotten better. Where his earlier songs reveled in their indisputable cleverness--with heartfelt but tongue-in-cheek analogies likening love to communism, for instance--here, on "You're No Dream," he tends to eschew cleverness in favor of sincerity, openness, and a complete baring of his innermost self. The clever puns haven't gone away entirely, but they are now comfortably outnumbered by genuine sentiment. There's a line in one of the album's best songs, "Honey Say It," where he croons, "Now I don't mind telling anyone what you have done for me, but they can figure it out. Oh really, it's easy," and it just feels so candid and wonderful, so much closer to the actual emotion being expressed, without too much wordplay to conceal the vulnerability and affection he evidently feels.



"You're No Dream" is a true pop album, perhaps even more of a summer pop album than "Hell Train" aimed to be, but it's an album for a lazy summer, for an oppressively hot summer mottled with welcome patches of shade.

"Honey Say It," the album's opening track, has quickly become my favorite on the disc, and is my current pick for Best Song of 2008. With its steadily plodding guitar line that escalates in both tempo and mournfulness, with its beautifully eerie series of cobbled organ notes that play cautiously behind the guitar in a way that might give even Anthony Newman chills, and with its haunting background vocals that seem to be sung by ghosts unperturbed by not existing, "Honey Say It" is a song that is impossible to listen to without being overwhelmed by goosebumps and chills.



The whole album, really, is like that--it's amazing, outstanding, commanding--the soundtrack of a reverent summer parade, an album that could have been made by ghosts, if ghosts were content to be trapped in limbo, and had access to a recording studio. Its songs cohere into a perfectly executed union of tone and feeling, but even taken individually, they're stellar.



"Out at the Wall" could easily be the album's big single, with its driving, loping bassline, its hot-weather imagery, and its skeptically-leaning lyrics--"I was made, with nothing in mind, no hand of The Lord, no quiet design, out at the wall." It is absolutely irresistible.



"Wedding Ring" is a spot-on portrait of marriage and what it might mean, both metaphorically and literally--"Wedding ring on the finger: do you really come right off?"--and ends with a curtain of shimmering guitar and vocals-as-instrumentation that just feels amazing.



"Sinkhole" brings a subtle, easy-in-the-islands feel to an apartment life romance, with a sense of total disbelief at finding someone wonderful, with a sad certainty that it can't go on forever and that the singer might not even want it to, and with horns. Oh man, the horns. It's a song I could hear playing across a darkened beach, watching icy waves, on a lawn chair next to a bucket full of ice and gold-colored beer. It's melancholy, peaceful, bittersweet and joyous.



"Necromancer" is perhaps the album's darkest song, almost sung as if from underwater; it seems to lyrically riff off of songs such as J.J. Cale's "Closer to You"-- the kinds of songs with words about wanting to be a girl's scarf so you could hang around her, and that sort of thing--but in a much darker and more natural way. For instance: "I'll be the fingers at your throat...." Nice.



Another contender for the album's best track is "Lemon Car," a deceptively deep song. On the surface, it appears to be a simple paean to a beat-up old car, but additional listens to it reveal it is a love song to a car by a guy who has nothing but his car, who has passed every chance by, in particular the chance to be loved. It is an anthemic love song to underachieving, to missed opportunities, and to being stuck in a rut. Here's the line that says it all: "Oh my beautiful, spinning wheels...." It seems to be about someone who never gave up control of his own life, his own vehicle, to just let love take him where it could.



Forgive my wordiness, but "You're No Dream" is yet another Soltero album that makes me want to write a manifesto, buy copies for everyone, and accost random people on the street to urge them to listen to it. It is the product of a musical evolution--the evolution of Soltero--an evolution that is as exciting as it has ever been and that is still going on today.



"You're No Dream" is the sort of album that no music lover should be without, that leaves no emotion unexplored and no sense unstimulated, that no summer should pass un-soundtracked by. If you don't own it already, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. You need it. There is a void in your soul, and it is shaped exactly like this."

Tim rocks.

A. Shah | Amhert, MA USA | 10/22/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"There is a range of sounds across this CD, and across Soltero's other CD's. They're all great."