This new album by Poliça, their sixth, isn’t breaking any new ground. The usual tasteful soundscapes and ethereal vocals are here in abundance and whilst track-to-track there’s enough sonic variety, as a whole Dreams Go ends up on the wrong end of the delicately poised wistful electronica seesaw. The end where Jo Whiley and bougie dinner parties sit.
It’s a low key affair, something belied by the preview track, also called ‘Dreams Go’, which appears to be the point – given this is, as Channey Leaneagh has commented, “an anthem for dreams we swallow, bury away while life goes on without them”.
The low key gloom makes yet more sense when viewed in the context of this being the band’s final work with bassist Chris Bierden, who has since received the dreadful news that he has brain cancer and is no longer able to play. It’s his swaggering bass line that drives first track ‘Dreams Go’ onwards. Let’s hope he kicks cancer right where it hurts and returns to form.
Third track ‘Li5a’ perhaps sums the album up. It feels well composed. It has a presence. Some interesting things happen here and there in the background. But on the whole there’s a superficial, one dimensional feel. The sort of music you hear in an Apple TV series starring Nicole Kidman, who spends too much time on the balcony of a spotless modern house, looking out to sea because rich person problems.
This soporific feel sets the tone through the likes of ‘Creepin’’ and ‘Revivial’. Although the swaggering bass does raise its head again at some points, such as on penultimate track ‘Wound Up’. This is where the album is strongest as there’s a counterpoint to the slick ennui that most of the work here is overridden by.
That might be why Poliça have yet to better 2018’s Music for the Long Emergency, when that inclination to naval gazing and ennui was tempered by the experimental s t a r g a z e orchestra. It gave the music a sense of tension and organic depth other albums have lacked.
But maybe I’m missing the point. Dreams Go dials up the feeling of emptiness – by the band’s own admission its energy is elegiac. They have good reason to feel elegiac and as an embodiment of dreams we bury away, a work of art in service to that end, it’s a success. The flipside of that is it somehow fails to operate as an engaging collection of songs.
