There’s little information out there on Michael Collins, the man behind the Run DMT moniker and Baltimore-based tape label Culture Dealer. He seems to release music, well, whenever he feels like it, and 2011 saw his most accessible release to date. It’s built in an admittedly haphazard fashion featuring the strange dichotomy of sun-blistered beach pop in the vein of earlier singles like “Spruce Bringsteen” and blissed out ambient tracks like “Mountain Mountain Groan” that feature someone (Collins?) describing their experiences on dimethyltryptamine. It’s certainly an odd listen at first, with the immediacy of tracks like “Richard” obscured by the weirdness of interludes like “Hallway Jingle”. Given time though, it becomes a strangely immersive experience, it all starts to make sense. The more you let Collins’ ramshackle set of songs take their form the more rewarding a listen it becomes. Here’s to hoping that he doesn’t disappear for another two years, because Dreams for all its imperfections, is one of the more interesting recent albums to break out of the ever homogenizing indie rock scene.
