It’s rare to review an album where one of the major target demographics would be particle physicists, but that’s certainly a group that would find a lot to love in Dummy’s new collection of stellar tracks. Free Energy, the second album from the Los Angeles dream-pop and shoegaze quartet, is a project indebted to the concepts of perpetual motion, the collision of particles, the ever-fluctuating rhythms of the spatial and the sub-atomic. The band, who suggested that the album title should make you think of unlimited “thermodynamic potential” and a “fire that doesn’t need fuel,” have made a record that wants to get you on the floor. Rather than using distorted guitars and looping synths that characterize Dummy’s sound as a background, Free Energy wants those elements to act as a canvas upon which pulsating, propulsive and continuously energizing tracks can bloom.
Following up on their well-regarded 2021 debut, Mandatory Enjoyment, Dummy’s members (co-vocalists Emma Maatman and Nathan O’Dell, along with guitar, bass and synth player Joe Trainor, and drummer and synth player Alex Ewell) wanted to make a more sprawling and exploratory record, and that has largely manifested in a series of tracks that deftly float between genres as if powered by the album’s titular concept. The sardonic lyrics (Maatman intoning “When it comes to an end / Have another laugh at my expense” on album highlight “Soonish…”) that marked their earlier work still remain, but the sonic palette that surrounds them has widened, rounding out the edgier nature of Dummy’s music. While every band is, to a certain degree, a product of their influences, Dummy’s bag of tricks now spans from Stereolab-esque organ loops to walls of my bloody valentine-style noise to ambient soundscapes that recall the Knife and Mt. Sims’ Tomorrow, In A Year to the jangle-pop of New Zealand’s Dunedin sound.
No two consecutive tracks on Free Energy wade in the same waters. We move from the trance-like rhythms and skittering drum pattern of opener “Intro-UB” to the wistful krautrock of “Soonish…,” the plaintive sax riff on “Opaline Bubbletear” turns into the catchy dream pop of “Blue Dada” before bubbling up with warped guitars that follow lead single “Nullspace” on its journey into the almost-alien and otherworldly. Even singular tracks themselves can be further divided into two parts, with many of them featuring beat switches or changes in tempo that create an album with a fractal nature, parts expanding outwards and colliding into each other with deftness and grace. Maatman and O’Dell’s layered vocals seem to float over the mix, and the resulting effect is that of a body, weightless but still moving with force and energy. Bands have been fascinated with space since the very beginnings of modern popular music (The Tornados’ “Telstar” even hit #1 in 1962), but Free Energy wants to take you on a journey through the infinitesimal.
While some of these experiments can move toward the repetitive—both “Opaline Bubbletear” and “Dip In The Lake” have a sort of ambience more commonly found in a spa waiting room than in a truly transportive soundscape—the large majority of Free Energy’s tracks use Dummy’s genre-shifting tendencies to create a sense of perpetual motion. Tracks will soothe you with their lulling loops and intricately-layered beats before getting you on your feet with a growing roar of noise that sees them take inspiration from their shoegaze peers and ancestors. The album’s best track, “Blue Dada,” opens with Maatman’s longing delivery of “When I look into your eyes / Only one thing comes to mind / It’s a sign / A perfect phrase for another time” before covering it in reverb and distortion as the verse changes to “Bathe me in the warm projections / Interact with vague reflections.”
There are no hard surfaces in Dummy’s songs on this album. Instead, Free Energy is musically lithe, constantly shifting the way it interacts with the listener. As the guitars pound harder and an organ freakout comes in as “Blue Dada” approaches its close, it’s difficult to remember this is the same song you were listening to two minutes ago. That’s the trick to Free Energy: a feeling that the tracks, and the atoms and energy within them, are always just on the verge of spinning out of control.
While Dummy themselves have spoken about wanting to make a faster and more energetic record this time round, it is fitting that Free Energy closes with “Godspin”— the calmest track on the album, which is, in large part, made up of field recordings the band collected on tour, along with a dulcimer feature from Jen Powers of Powers/Rolin. You might hear birdsong, tinkling chimes, a babbling brook or a car speeding by as you listen. You might hear a whole coterie of sounds colliding with a gentle force, particles being brought into contact by the guiding hands of the band. It’s an encapsulation of the whole ethos of the album—that divergent sounds and influences can nestle together and form new patterns, that messiness can become kinetic and propulsive if treated with the right impulses. It’s what keeps the album from feeling too repetitive, even as we can note Dummy’s tendencies toward those first-half Stereolab beats and second-half mbv walls of noise. After all that movement and expansive sound, the record closes on a quieter note, the recordings quietly fading out into nothing. After all, that energy does still have to end up burning out somehow. And while the scientific concept is currently theoretically impossible, we can safely prove that Free Energy is a successful experiment.
