You can watch the video below (with a lovely video from Hana Tajima), and pre-order the album here.

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Labeling Conversations as “dream pop” would be to do it a disservice. This isn’t some formulaic collection of by-the-numbers, post-chillwave, bedroom recorded, melancholic pop music, but rather an assortment of influences and ideas, a willingness to experiment with sounds and structure. For example, the album’s shortest song (excluding a forty second instrumental piece), ‘All In The Name Of Good Dancing’, clocks in at under two minutes, whereas ‘Dream Talk’, the album’s sprawling midsection, breaks the ten minute barrier.

The album opens with ‘Drift Down’, which you can see in video form below. The song is perfectly titled, feeling like the soundtrack to a slow and gentle descent. Next up is ‘Familiar Ground’ which starts slow and considered and builds into a climax that shimmers and swirls like something by Beach House.

‘The Bear’ is a Gothic folk fairytale, reserved and slightly creepy, like Timber Timbre whispering as they fall asleep. It tells the tale of a journey into the woods and an encounter with a grizzly bear.

“Trapped we are inside this place, 
trapped we will dig our own graves

But the bear will keep us safe,
if we only do one thing for him.”

Perhaps one for your alternative Halloween mixtape?

The aforementioned ‘Dream Talk’ descends into a lovely throbbing murmur, with barely audible vocals that echo and fade, not entirely unlike Julianna Barwick. ‘Ill’ is devastatingly sad and pretty, opening with the line, “try to pretend you’re not dying”, it captures the same mournful air of The Antlers’ brilliant album, Hospice. Next, ‘All In The Name of Dancing’ changes the tone, a Memoryhouse style pop song. The album closer (this time excluding an instrumental/ambient bonus track) ‘Chairs’ is all dreamy and pretty for a while and then begins a slightly surreal acceleration and ends in some kind of muted frenzy.

Check out the video for ‘Drift Down’ below:

You can get Conversations on a pay-what-you-want basis via the band’s Bandcamp page. It’s not often you find ‘free’ music with as much heart and attention to detail as this, so please dig deep and give the band a little something, they deserve it.

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’Holiday’ is the new LP from Port St. Willow and continues everything that was so so good about his previous work. Each tracks blends into the next conveying an almost loop-like sense of continuity, the feeling that you could put the album on repeat and let it cycle around and around. Again his vocals are earnest against the electronic sounds and has no problem raising to the occassion when the drums kick in and the tempo is lifted. As he suggests himself, I’d say this would sound even better looking out of a train window or half asleep on an overnight flight. The sort of record which takes you to a different place or brings some sense of meaning to the place in which you are in. The very same effect that I got from Silberman’s Hospice. I would love to see how the songs take shape when performed live since there was a very real difference between Hospice on record and in a show. I wonder if he sticks to the ambient style or leans towards rock songs a bit more? Either way I bet it would be a real spectacle in the right environment.

Holiday is out now. It can be streamed from his Bandcamp page or downloaded for a meagre $7. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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