The Lucid Dream: The Deep End – album review

The Lucid Dream: The Deep End

(Holy Are You Recordings)

All formats

Out now

All four of The Lucid Dream members were too young to have been dancing and gurning the night away in a field but their fifth album appears at times to be a tribute to 90s rave culture.

The album was written by vocalist, guitarist and synth player Mark Emmerson over the spring of 2019, and as well as the usual Roland 303/808s they’ve brought a SH01a and sampler into the mix.

Epic opener Coalescence sets their stall out as from the first note as sirens wail away before looping synths and spacey vocals take the listener back to an era when EMF were sort of cool, and ravers were driving around the country to get off their heads in the mud.

CH1-03 is a straighter dance number with the sampler deployed with disembodied voices that seem to anticipate the BLM movement swirl around the 303’s treated vocals.

Leave Me In The Dark is a seven-minute trip – not that sort – around most of dance culture with a lot of the Chemical Brothers in there and even features a semi-bass solo as it all gets a bit drum and bass. They go a bit more 80s East Coast and channels the Beastie Boys on Fight To Survive.

Then it’s off to the Balearics for the laidback Sunrise, which you could imagine getting played at superclub Manumission as the soundtrack to one of their notorious live shows.

Surreally it all ends more much conventionally with a wannabe indie anthem, High and Wild, with Emmerson singing without any vocal treatment. and a sustained psychedelic guitar break that is reminiscent of Fool’s Gold.

There’s nothing hugely original here but it is an album that melds its influences intelligently to look forward and back.

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Words by Paul Clarke. You can see his author profile here.