Most of the material from Mr. Dream’s 2011 debut sounds like the soundtrack to a nightmarish bar fight. Trash Hit is a solid half hour chunk of ugly-as-hell punk with plenty of muscle, but behind the brawn lies a giant brain. Over the course of the album, the band separates itself from many of its contemporaries by flaunting a knack for stylistic exploration and absurd humor, e.g., “I’ve been to Hell / Everyone cries there / The demons are great.” Since Trash Hit, bands like Pop. 1280 and The Men have been following Mr. Dream’s lead and releasing albums that also noisily mess around with punk aesthetics. Hardly a year later, the band is now part of a revolution that seeks to evict the cutesiness pervading much of the independent rock scene.
The Brooklyn trio’s new EP, Fatherland, shows them stepping up the production value slightly, but maintaining the discordant edge from their debut. The title track, possibly the strongest one on the EP, opens things up with a gritty strut. After a tinny-yet-infectious guitar hook clatters in, Adam Moerder’s distinctively sinister drawl throws some lyrics around about building a house made of sticks and gaining weight. It’s a fun track that slowly builds into a noisy climax, with Moerder’s delivery turning from playful to urgent as he loudly jeers, “Hey! / Kids! / You’ll never get it back!”
Aside from the up-tempo jaunt that follows, “Palace Complex,” the pace on Fatherland never touches breakneck speeds, as it occasionally did on their debut. While some of the abrasion goes missing as a result, paring the tempos back allows Mr. Dream’s attention to detail to come to the fore. With this EP, the band is establishing itself as less of an act and more as a talented group of musicians. On “Believing and Shitting,” for instance, some Pinback-esque backing vocals accentuate the chorus, and a subtle, reverb-laden guitar solo comes out of the right channel towards the end. The most shocking moment comes when a clean guitar opens up “Slow Learner” and stays there throughout. Although it’s a straightforward acoustic tune, the track is substantial because it’s easily the prettiest thing that Mr. Dream has recorded to date. That being said, it feels remarkably out of place on this album.
Any glimmer of potential cleanliness vanishes in an instant with the closing track. Opening up with a sludgy bass line and a heavy beat, “The Room” burns slowly and hauntingly. Until the coda hits, the production is minimal and empty, which makes its crawling speed that much more foreboding. This closer is Mr. Dream at its creepiest, although even here some of the band’s trademark tongue-in-cheek humor comes through – Moerder’s last word on the album is “bones,” sung in a sing-song falsetto that deliberately clashes with the hard-hitting psych-punk outro.
Noisy yet accessible, rough yet meticulously constructed, Fatherland is an eclectic album that sounds perplexed with what it wants to be. At the same time, Mr. Dream is finally settling into its own sound. Unlike its predecessor, Fatherland places more emphasis on groove and interplay, less on visceral instrument smashing. This EP seems like a transitional work – all the more reason to pay attention to what these guys come up with next.
