When Jam City's Jack Latham debuted his Dream a Garden material at Krakow's Unsound festival last fall, he scattered an armload of roses across the stage before strapping on a guitar and stepping behind a laptop and microphone. It was a dramatic way of wiping the slate clean, of marking a line between "then" and "now." Previously, he had been known as one of the standard-bearers for the Night Slugs label and its concussive club sound, and his 2012 album Classical Curves is widely regarded as one of the label's high points.
The songs he performed at Unsound bore little in common with his previous material, though, and neither does Dream a Garden, where jangly guitar licks and reverberant synthesizer predominate, and where half the tracks feature Latham's own earnest, high-pitched vocals. The album swims in reverb, phaser, tremolo, panning, and distortion. Where Classical Curves was slick and brittle, equal parts techno and grime, Dream a Garden is sticky and humid; where Classical Curves seemed streaked with graphite, Dream a Garden buckles like moldy carpet.
Latham assembles this sound from a mossy patchwork that proves hard to source: The watery keyboards often recall Cocteau Twins, or a more moth-eaten M83. The guitars—notes bent, signal clean—often evoke funk, or at least an idea of it. In "Proud", the wah-wah hints at Hot Buttered Soul; in "The Garden Thrives", the tone and strumming style recalls Prince's "Sexy Dancer".
Ultimately, though, this sound is all him. To Latham's credit, there's really nothing else out there that sounds like it. The newness of it is exciting, and so is the fullness of his vision; between the narcotic mood and the omnipresent murk, Dream a Garden suggests a maze-like expanse within its borders, perfect for getting lost in. Unfortunately, the album only partly lives up to those promises. The songwriting isn't quite there, for one thing. Chord changes meander, or get tripped up on a single leaden pedal tone. The same elements crop up again and again, and the layers of effects and detuned keyboards eventually turn oppressive; the album isn't much more than a half-hour long, but by the end it feels like chugging eggnog on a summer's day.
And Latham's voice frequently sounds thin and strained, perpetually aiming for notes that are just beyond his reach. He tends to bury it deep in the mix, too, so that it's almost impossible to decipher what he's actually singing. (The lone line I could pick out, from "Today": "And not so long ago/ I was a child with a computer.") "This is a record about love and resistance," declared the press release for the album, and in interviews he has stressed the necessity of finding "different emotional avenues of political expression." Those might be his goals, but sometimes it's not enough to just dream a garden; to get it to actually bear fruit takes planning and hard work, and to have planted in more fertile soil than he has chosen here.
