the soundtrack to your blurbs

yesterday, for the first time in 4 years, i spent more than 5 minutes playing a video game. unfortunately, that meant that i played pirates for, oh, about 6 hours. and, since 3am's a bit late, i'm ragged tired. thus, i've been beth-ordered to refrain from blogging (and pirates) past 10:45pm tonight. it's 10:55 now, so the only way i could (almost) conceivably do that is to stop NOW. that means you're in for a treat; i have no course but to recycle some old material.

wednesday's post suggested that my image update was my first nationally published blurb. while that's true, i almost had an album review/recommendation/press release published a few years ago. if you google just right, you might be still be able to find the blurb, but to make it easier for you, here's the last saved version on my laptop:





THE SOUNDTRACK TO YOUR DREAMS

As we sleep, the night corrals our dreams. One by one he warily drives them to their pens. But occasionally some nighttime reverie slips free. Then, in a rare hallowed moment, our consciousness can sneak peeks at a fascinating new world, a world so mesmerizing it can only be marred by the inevitable alarm clock buzz of morning.

But don’t let daytime get you down. The nearly newest album from [the now deceased] local Seattle band The Dandelion Method casts a net deep into the sea of our dreams and somehow extracts the musical equivalent of that idyllic waking moment. Band drummer, Joel Hartse, explains that their self-titled sophomore album is “a picture of where we have been the past 2 years – we've been through a ton: marriages, college graduations, new jobs, new houses…” Perhaps, but really the album is too familiar, as if the band sifted through our personal dreamscapes in order to produce this precise blend of guitar, voice, drum, and keys.

Like a dream, there's a certain delicateness to The Dandelion Method. Rather than standard rock n’ roll fare, we find glistening dew drops suspended in some lucky Charlotte’s embroidered web. The layered instruments build tension, collide, and then suddenly dissolve in quiet a cappella harmonies. Though it hardly seems fitting to describe an album laced with crashing guitars and rapid drum beats as delicate, these recent college grads have concocted a paradoxical hybrid of well choreographed ballet and hole-in-the-wall jam. The album suggests that there may finally be two ways to keep dreaming well into the workday: either unplug your alarm or make room in the web for The Dandelion Method.

Andrew David