A Dream Outside
Liberator Music
British quartet Gengahr came to the forefront of the emerging 21st century psych-pop scene early last year with Powder/Bathed in the Light, joining bands like Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Tame Impala in the revival of a ‘60s-melodic-psych-pop-rock era made up of fuzz, reverb pedals, phasing, distortion and heavy layering.
Gengahr have now released A Dream Outside. And it’s phenomenal. It hems in a dream-like sound that urges you to lie on your back with headphones in, eyes shut, sending you into a daze that is far from sleep. From romance to heartbreak to witches to poltergeists and ghosts, A Dream Outside is abstracted and chimerical, and very, very real.
Heroine and Dark Star develop with Laurence Bushe’s voice and John Victor’s guitar lines being lost in each other, synthesising into a musically fantastic collaboration between voice and instrument that encompasses the literal meaning of song. This is why Bushe is an ‘artist’, because he is not just a singer, and this is why Gengahr are one of the very few bands that can make us sing-a-long to an instrumental.
And John Victor’s indescribably epic, song-concluding guitar solos would need an entirely new review of their own.
CLAUDIA NATHAN
