The most distinct and memorable voice heard on Ital's Hive Mind was a shredded and reassembled Lady Gaga coolly stammering the titular, "Born This Way"-sourced refrain of "Doesn't Matter (If You Love Him)" over grimy downtempo funk-house. The most distinct and memorable voice heard on Dream On, meanwhile, is the one that opens "What a Mess": the flange-distorted pleads of a choked-up woman at a 2009 town hall meeting, asking Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn what he could do to help her uninsured husband after he suffered a traumatic brain injury. Coburn's response-- that citizens have to rely on community instead of government for help-- is multitracked and reverbed into oblivion before being smothered by a dense organ chord and crumbled apart by skittering hi-hats.
It's a willfully bizarre sample for a producer to slot into a postmodern house track, even one that rides on a tension between minimalism and abrasion. But it's also one of Daniel Martin-McCormick's clearest signals yet that he's got a certain dedication to finding the potential for repulsion in a traditionally euphoric and physical strain of music. Just how ugly Dream On gets is a matter of degrees-- most of it isn't as up-front as that opening to "What a Mess", and when it does manifest it's usually more in the form of a creeping dissonance or a slow build to something intriguingly grotesque. This album exploits the fine line between repetition as groove and repetition as unnerving tic, head music that worries the body.
Opening track "Despot" is as close as things get to the spaced-out momentum of its predecessor album's brightest moments. But even its straightforwardly dense backbeat is in the service of a pulse that feels more like tension than release, building unease with with stuttering shards of chirping monosyllabic vocals and directionless melodies that pace around looking over their shoulders instead of cresting. "Boi" has a similar creep to oblivion, opening on a stark wave of congealing lava-flow synth ooze before the groove clicks into place. The pairing of fragmented vocal loops (a churn that gradually emerges as the phrase "baby boy"), tight-packed clap-snare-throb percussion, and subtle, deeply submerged melodic touches sets up a lush space-- but that only makes things more disorienting when he brings in a succession of high-pitched, intermittent buzzing whirs that resemble pitched-up F1 race cars.
But Ital never loses the plot, even when it seems like throwing off casual dancefloor vibes is part of the point. The way "Enrique" starts splitting at the seams, choppy intonations of firing-up jet engine whirs crackling through the edges, only makes its three-miles-deep echo chamber feel sound less stark and emotionless than it did on the outset. And closer "Deep Cut (Live Edit)" makes for a bracing reprieve from the rest of the album's tension, following up the knife-edge snares, organ growls, and panic-attack layered vocals of "What a Mess" with a spacious deep house atmosphere that only gets more high-spirited when the noisy bits seep in-- that buzzsaw drone might as well be a chorus of angels. Ital's sense of abrasion and his notion of groove are both finely tuned, so it's all for the best when they work in parallel.
