REVIEWS

ELEPHANT MICAH
Your Dreams Are Feeding Back [BlueSanct]

How well do you remember your dreams? Elephant Micah's Your Dreams Are Feeding Back is that kind of a dream album. It feels good when you are listening to it but it's really hard to remember much of it later. Indiana's Elephant Micah aka Joe O'Connell makes lo-fi alt-country with a touch of electronics. It's a long way off from the Neil Young generation. Who else would make such avant tracks such as Duet For Mower and Chainsaw? Or the eight-minute long Deliver Us From Broken Glass, which doesn't rage like Neil Young's Like A Hurricane with an endless guitar solo but instead strums lazily along on acoustic guitar to electronic sampling effects.

There is even a track called Mt Neil Young which sort of portrays O'Connell's dream world: "the things I do these days are look outside the window/I watch the washing machine/It all gets old in slow motion/I wait around for some piece of junk mail to come from your smoke-filled brain/When it comes, I can't breathe." The songs essentially paint O'Connell's inner and outer landscapes, his sense of nostalgia and sadness (TV-like Slow Motion) and his minimalist love songs (O Vocabulary). There are 18 tracks running for 64 minutes. It's a long dream. It feels like a good dream but darn if I know what it all means. - Philip Cheah