Before disbanding earlier this year, the Brooklyn trio Mr. Dream released an album and an EP that advocated enthusiasm over originality. Knowing that vocalist/guitarist Adam Moerder and drummer Nick Sylvester are music critics (both have written for Pitchfork and elsewhere) made that exultation in musical influences even sweeter: these were music geeks, geeking out about the stuff they love, in song form. It wasn’t all as reductive as that, though; there were still touches of sarcasm, cynicism, and slyness found in those two releases, a self-awareness about the open appropriation of musical heroes. But with the group’s posthumous full-length, Ultimate in Luxury, that swirl of perk and punk has turned a little sour.
The loving pastiches of indie-rock past are still there, but Mr. Dream has flipped the calendar forward dramatically. “Making Muscles” slips, shudders, and shivers in a gut-churning approximation of Chavez’s art-drone lope. It’s ’90s alt-rock turned in on itself until it knots up into prog, but it can't help but come across as a thought experiment and not a particularly dimensional one, despite Moerder’s attempt to stab some of the prickly atmospherics of Public Image Ltd.’s “Theme” into the mix—an element the track doesn’t have room for, let alone need.
Ultimate in Luxury inches backward from there, but only briefly. Bits of Brian Eno and David Bowie emerge, particularly on “Cheap Heat,” an adrenaline-injected take on the icicle jangle of "Needle in the Camel’s Eye”—complete with Moerder trying to hit the stars with his high notes—and the cheeky call for “rock ’n’ roll patricide” on “Bloodmobile”, as if driving the nail in Bowie’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.” It’s clever, and it says nothing. Even worse, it that frame of reference is at odds with the early-00s dance-punk of “Fringy Slider”—which, regardless of the Pavement-esque name, approximates the sashay of early Franz Ferdinand—and “Work Faster”, which boogies as clumsily as a Dismemberment Plan song dressed as a !!! song for Halloween. Bassist Matt Morello unfurls some monstrous, art-funk low-end, but Sylvester’s half-hearted hand with disco rhythms somehow has the power to make a drum kit sound sarcastic.
Sincerity is as much of a false virtue as originality, and Mr. Dream know it, maybe too well. Scattershot instead of eclectic, tentative instead of thoughtful, tracks such as the Girls Against Boys-leaning “Loud Tools” and the jittery “Sad Bastard Unit” can’t seem to decide if they even believe in themselves, let alone what they might be trying to convey. That is, until the album’s final three songs. “Watched It Wrong”, “Just Results”, and “Mouth Off” are catchy, dynamic, and astringent in all the right ways and places. Moerder’s dissonant string-bends, plucked straight out of “Scentless Apprentice”, actually click into place on “Watched It Wrong”, as does his Mark E. Smith snarl-croon on “Mouth Off.” Inspiration and perspiration finally meet, mingle, and melt.
Those three songs would be more suited to the kickoff of their next album than the end of this one; it’s a shame that album won’t come. Sometimes the only thing separating a middling band from a magnificent one isn’t just the ability to write and play strong songs, but to do so consistently and convincingly. If Ultimate in Luxury had been able to fully seize and own that potential, Mr. Dream might have left a better aftertaste.
