To make a pretentious concept album, you have to start with a pretentious concept, and Dredg picked a novel one: \x93sleep paralysis.\x94 Wading through the extensive liner notes for El Cielo, you can read all about this phenomenon, where you wake up to discover you cax92t move, or maybe it's that you're dreaming you cax92t move, and there's something about auditory hallucinations-- actually, I never figured out exactly what it is. And I'm also not sure why they wrote an entire album about it.
That's just the first puzzle in Dredg's latest full-length. This California art metal band resembles Tool raised by hippies, encouraged to finger-paint all day. Veering between ominous dirges and wide-eyed big sky anthems, they play massive art metal that's been treated to multi-layered, intricate production in the vein of Radiohead and Pink Floyd; and for a band that can smash and roil like waves against Pacific beaches, they frequently take the subtler road, softening themselves with atmosphere and world music flourishes.
There's just one problem: El Cielo makes no sense. I dox92t mean the lyrics or the central concept, which are enough of a Rorschach test to let any devoted fan dig out whatever they want from this album (post-millennial dread, musings on the conflict between the real and the unreal, the active and the paralyzed-- all your favorite themes are here), but the hundred and one ideas thrown onto this record dox92t hang together. It's too diffuse to match its scope, and all of the influences melt down to a bland sheen.
Although frontman Gavin Hayes could have set the tone here, he's a hard man to read. Painfully earnest and sounding more assured than on their previous record
Leitmotif, he's still in an awkward niche: he's too sincere and hopeful to sandpaper our eyes with visions of horror, yet too smooth to let his guard down. Mostly, he just sounds weird: his lyrics are like getting trapped at a party by a guy who wants to talk about dolphins, or Ralph Nader. \x93All you need is a modest house in a modest neighborhood/ In a modest town where honest people dwell,\x94 he states at one point, with a naiveté that's neither affected nor effective. Then wonder fills his voice as he sings, \x93Babies are born/ In the same buildings where people go/ To pass away...pass away.\x94 Yes, Gavin. People die.
You cax92t fault the rest of the band, when they stick to melodic hard rock at least; they nail the punchy clean riffs on \x93Sanzex94, and tracks like \x93Convalescent\x94 and \x93Eighteen People Living in Harmony\x94 burn with the urgency of painting flames on a classic car, but they lose their edge when they soften the mood. As exotic and svelte as Dredg want to sound, they havex92t found a way to do it without watering down their music. When they don acoustic guitars, they cax92t help but rip off \x93Paranoid Android\x94; the Latin accents and slower tempos are as authentic as a Zorro movie.
Knowing their limits, they've also dragged a circus of performers onto the record: strings, world musicians like the Iranian-born singer Azam Ali, and, lest I forget, the members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, who close the album in an almost clichéd finale of hope and uplift. Dredg integrates some of these varied elements into their songs-- percussionist Greg Ellis may be the sharpest collaboration-- but quarantine others within the five instrumental interludes, subtitled \x93brushstrokes\x94, sticking random fragments of music between the songs. It's these bewildering variety on the edges of the record that give it a taint of mystery and exoticism, complementing that all-purpose metaphor of sleep paralysis.
But cramming all of this stuff together doesx92t mean it adds up to anything: without the material and structure to make use of it, it's just a big multicultural mess. Dredg has to learn how to harness all of the ideas-- and major label money-- they now bring to these projects, the very things that gave them access to such a wellspring of talent. Next time, even if they drag in the world music, the choir and everything else, they should start with a concept that's easier to write about, something tangible, something with boundaries. Concept is only validating if it adds cohesion to your work, if it informs the compositions. This collection of unrelated experiments could have been anything, and though Dredg claims they're all related somehow, these songs fail to flow together, even as dreams.
