Review: Glass Animals’s Dreamland Relies Too Heavily on the Mundanities of Reality

The album makes room for evocative, sensory lyrics and sonics that verge on the cinematic, but it also spends a lot of time on the mundane.

Glass Animals, Dreamland
Photo: Elliott Arndt

Glass Animals’s Dreamland blurs the line between dreams and reality, winding its way through a diaristic tour of frontman Dave Bayley’s life. The album catalogues the singer-songwriter’s relationships, observations, and growing pains with a typically felt and colorful attention toward the senses. As such, it’s more personal than either of the band’s previous two efforts, but that also means that it sacrifices the kaleidoscopic alignment of feeling and imagination that helped make those albums so distinct. It’s a bit of a trade-off, then, as the change in subject matter allows Glass Animals to find new direction, but their previous mode of world-building was, in some ways, more satisfying.

The band’s 2014 debut, Zaba, was seemingly dispatched from another planet, with lyrics filled with oddball imagery that was accompanied by vaguely exotic, waterlogged instrumentals and distant birdcalls, while 2016’s How to Be a Human Being was a playfully literary collection of songs about a cast of fictional characters. Dreamland still makes room for evocative, sensory lyrics and sonics that verge on the cinematic, highlighting the sense of physical touch (the latter word is used several times throughout), but it also spends a lot of time on the mundane artifacts in Bayley’s personal memory bank—Grand Theft Auto, hotels with “pool paintings on the wall,” Scooby-Doo, The Price Is Right—to middling effect. And his expressions of lust for various lovers alternate between the pedestrian (“Sometimes all I think about is you/Late nights in the middle of June” is repeated ad nauseam on “Heat Wave”) and the nonsensical (“You taste like surfing videos,” from “Waterfalls Coming Out Your Mouth”).

Throughout Dreamland, Bayley remains fixated on the carnal escapes that make reality bearable, like sex and drugs, and the fleetingness of those pleasures, which Glass Animals explores with a knowing wisdom. The band’s songs toe the line between dissecting such coping mechanisms and offering an escape of their own: Their bouncy keys, irrepressible melodies, and Bayley’s malleable vocals are intoxicating in their own right, belying the fact that these songs are keenly aware of how temporary their pleasures are.

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The standout “Your Love (Déjà Vu)” perfectly encapsulates this threading of the needle, pairing twirling flute and celebratory, horn-like synths with lyrics such as, “I know you want one more night/And I’m backsliding/Into this just one more time.” The relationship described on the song is a momentary fix whose dwindling potency is conveyed by Glass Animals in such a way that suggests time is running out and that they’re making the absolute most of it.

As Dreamland pivots from polished indie rock to electro-pop to hip-hop, it largely sidelines Drew MacFarlane’s guitar, which is only front and center on the self-professed B-side “Melon and the Coconut.” Thumping 808s and skittering hi-hats dominate songs like “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” and “Heat Wave,” replacing the shuffling drums, marimbas, and raw-material-inspired percussion of the band’s prior work, and it’s surprisingly refreshing. “Tangerine” incorporates a staccato beat that sounds almost identical to the one on Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” while Dr. Dre is name-checked on “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” a West Coast reference that Glass Animals doubles down on by having Top Dawg fixture Derek Ali mix the track.

Like How to Be a Human Being, Dreamland moves into more vulnerable terrain in the end, but the earlier album’s concluding run of emotive anthems, including “Poplar St” and “Agnes,” completed a well-rounded emotional arc. Here, songs like “It’s All So Incredibly Loud” and “Domestic Bliss”—which focus on a relationship’s breaking point and a woman experiencing domestic abuse, respectively—make dreary use of swelling string sections, undermining what should be the album’s tragic fulcrum. Instead, Dreamland’s best moments are propelled by slick drum machines and Bayley’s confidence as a frontman. His turn inward isn’t without humor and insight, but writing about other people on past albums provided a more enveloping experience, fleshing out imagined places and people with an intrigue that’s missing here.

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 Release Date: August 7, 2020  Buy: Amazon

Charles Lyons-Burt

Charles Lyons-Burt covers the government contracting industry by day and culture by night. His writing has also appeared in Spectrum Culture, In Review Online, and Battleship Pretension.

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