Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Many will declare when asked that their dreams are always forgotten the moment they wake up, some will linger beyond the first drowsy shake of the head and the casual swipe of rheum from the eye, but the dream, unless absolutely memorable for its content, will fade into dust like much of history.
Then there are those that have a type of visual trap for the concept beyond the daily understanding, a dreamcatcher of the surreal and the fantastic, and they turn those visions into art, be it strange, outlandish, no matter how odd, they turn their back on the ordinary and create a feeling, a pulse, that is captured in the subtlety of clay, marble, the line of a poem, in the majesty of the Dream Catching Songs.
To find a musician who sparks imagination and the beauty of the surreal in their set, is to find fortune in the web of the dreamcatcher, and so with Thomas Truax, along with flexible and venerated drummer Budgie, and the his innovation of the self-made mechanical drum machine, Mother Superior, Dream Catching Songs soars with wings of light gold above the hard edged and the anthem like, above the wee-regarded and the demonstrably fuelled passions of others and sits on its own cloud in a state of what some might call chaos, but is in actuality, simple human grace.
Post Punk surreal Americana, poetry set on edge and given freedom to take any form it wishes, in his tenth studio album Thomas Truax takes the listener on a journey of the magnificent, the unbound, the untethered trip of a lifetime, and that dreamcatcher, it is the source of all that sounds fantastic and unbelievably cool.
Now based in the old industrial heartlands of Birmingham, England, a place itself of innovation and poets, Thomas Truax, Budgie, and Mother Superior wax lyrical across tracks such as Everything’s Going To Be All Right, The Anomalous Now, the tremendous Free Floaters, the intent of Origami Spy Arrives In A Paper Boat, and the finale in The Fisherman’s Wishing Well Prayer, and gives the listener a touch of the splendid divine, the spirit of imagination without hampering its, and the audience’s, soul.
Dream Catching Songs is a blessing you didn’t know you needed in your life, a piece of art, a sound of the unconscious desire awoken and given life; for this is no dip into the grey and the usual, this is an immersion into belief, and the waters are welcoming.
Thomas Truax releases Dream Catching Songs on January 20th.
Ian D. Hall