From the moment Jeremy Jay began recording under his own name, his vision was fully realized: He wanted to write about dreams. In 2007, he released Dreamland, a debut composed of (dreamy!) instrumental pop meant to accompany a film he had yet to shoot. One year later, he released the doo-wop tinted A Place Where We Could Go, his first full-length for K Records and the first to feature his own vocals. That album's first words? "Night, night." Since then, he's dressed up his louche stripe of indie-pop in a variety of sonic getups, stripping down to sleek'n'minimal synth essentials for 2009's Slow Dance, donning a ragged alt-rock cape for the guitar crunch of 2010's Splash, and now a chilly combination of the two for Dream Diary, his latest. What glues them all together is his unwavering fascination with the dream state, both as a lyrical pipeline and method of delivery. Because as he presents himself here, now more than ever, Jeremy Jay sounds as though he works in silk pajamas.
That's not a comment on Jay's work ethic or his sartorial charms but rather the smooth and easy sensibility with which he lays everything down to tape. His longest full-length by a curious distance, Dream Diary maintains a nocturnal feel throughout. Additionally, it appears to be the purest distillation of that which Jay set out to do on Day One: Offer up images of last night at their most skeletal and straightforward. This calls for bare-bones chordcraft and sonics, a pursuit Jay does well to provide. As "Caught in a Whirl" threads slinky bass to eerie synths to ultra clean guitar, Jay croons, "You met me at the store with your rainbow hair/ And we drove, windows down, past the sullen fog/ Breathing in the ocean air that night/ We walked down the steps, yeah, we didn't look back." Just as he does moments later in the post-punk play-by-play of "By the Rivers Edge" and the spy guitar-bolstered snap of "Secret Sounds", Jay is nar [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| rating. Word for word, much of Dream Diary's lyric sheet plays exactly like its title would have you [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| believe: as though it were lifted from a book he keeps next to his bed and fills with traces of whatever he can remember seeing in his sleep.
That doesn't make for a particularly inviting listen, but it does tend to be far more compelling than it sounds on paper. What's smart about Jay's approach this time out has everything to do with his ear/eye for the screen-- no matter how mundane the detail or direction, his take on soliloquizing calls for special attention. In fact, as long as the hook's in place, as it is on haunting high point "It's Just a Walk in the Park", it's not uncommon to find yourself waiting for whatever the script holds just around the corner. Jay has a way with those, and sonically, Dream Diary communicates that really well. Though overlong by about a third, the Bishop Allen-by-way-of-Modest Mouse bends of "In the Times", and the Belle and Sebastian-like breeze of "Shayla" boast some of Jay's finest lures yet. Though they're vivid and they're sweet, like dreams, they're not particularly memorable. They fade away too soon.
