Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
If you dream, make sure it is every colour available, don’t settle for black and white and don’t let anything but a magical experience take you down in the hands of Morpheus willingly or without a fight, to dream is to be thankful, to Dream Dream well that is a case of allowing the brain to undergo some sort of state where metamorphosis reigns supreme.
The sense of the transformation is abundant in Secret Colours, the ability to sound as if you are part of another’s culture is always a gift worth having but for this tribe of young Chicago musicians, the sense that they can tap into the British soul, the once proud thought of a 90s resurgent British pop phenomena, still breathing but one who takes stock of life as they contemplate the view of one of the Great Lakes, the scene of an imposing landscape behind its waves and cool summer winds, is most undoubtedly American; it is a metamorphosis that can only be seen and heard in a reverie of excitement.
For Secret Colours, Dream Dream is not so much a simple request placed before the listener, it is the urging to reach beyond your normal ambition with exploiting others, to see the world as one to be nurtured and helped, one to whom can then aid your own dreams, for if the world has nobody looking out for it, then how do you expect to exist within its marble like realm.
In tracks such as Pins and Needles, Feed The Machine, Changes in Nature, Carry On and Places I’m Going, Secret Colours open up upon a sense of desire, an album in which could have come from one of the great and admired bands who strode the British pop scene in the 90s and to whom instead is to be lauded as perhaps a new generation of Chicago based heroes.
Dream big, dream with hunger and appetite, for who knows what is in store when the Dream Dream comes to fruition.
Secret Colours’ Dream Dream is released on July 7th.
Ian D. Hall