I'd imagine that Old School finds its way into many a Netflix queue at this point in the year, as outgoing college seniors face the grim specter of adulthood. Maybe it's just serendipitous timing, but I can't help but see this film as a primary influence on You May Already Be Dreaming, even if Neva Dinova has been around since the 1990s and are on their third full-length LP. As Saddle Creek's diaspora continues to expand sonically as well as geographically, for their label debut, the Nebraska band (previously featured with Conor Oberst on the One Jug of Wine, Two Vessels EP) sounds seduced by the prospect of "living the dream" via arrested development, in this case, a time when the imprint/collective could be relied on for little more than Omaha natives playing a tears-in-your-Sparks combo of "acceptable country" structure and indie self-centeredness. The simplicity of the form makes it incredibly hard to fuck up, but You May Already Be Dreaming posits that it's also incredibly hard to make interesting.
It's far from unlistenable-- the production is crisp and smooth, the songs uncomplicated and uncluttered-- and Jake Bellows has a pleasant, conversational sing-speak of a voice that rests somewhere near saltine roots-types like Andrew Bird and M. Ward. But the title unfortunately serves as its own epitaph: envision an alternate reality where the California sound of the 70s was more influenced by ether than cocaine. Even when they try to season their folky blandishments with fuzzbox soloing on "Clouds" and "Someone's Trippin'", it's still too lethargic to sound like something other than the death whinnies of Crazy Horse lurching to the glue factory.
Perhaps even more so than Titus Andronicus, these guys beg for a reevaluation in regards to the influence early Saddle Creek recordings. While Conor Oberst and Tim Kasher rarely saw past their own shoes and tended to equate violently oscillating caterwaul with honesty, they managed to short-circuit conventional confessional songwriting by failing to acknowledge any walls, let alone the fourth. The problem here is that Bellows has far too much trouble saying what he actually means. "It's hard to love a body from the ground" goes the infinitely repeated mantra of the first track, and while it's not hard to follow, it also doesn't amount to a whole lot. "Will the Ladies Send You Flowers" tries for some sort of hardscrabble deathbed confessional, but you never get a sense of any real emotion other than comfortable numbness, and I'm fairly certain that wasn't the point; the vague laments about women and whiskey reek of someone who slept through most of their week at Drive-By Truckers Fantasy Camp.
Specificity rarely turns out well either, as "Supercomputer" tries to install Wolf Parade's "We Built Another World" into a MacBook, but instead we get a liveblog of playing SimEarth. And if there's a time when lyrically using "Google" as a verb will be acceptable, it's far in the future. Even when they (maybe) skew misogynistic on "She's A Ghost", lines like "Let the sun dry your towels instead of me" are really too cryptic to offer even a base pleasure.
But as much as the words drag down You May Already Be Dreaming, Neva Dinova's bigger problem is casting its lot with such a limited handful of sounds. If we're to take "Apocalypse" at face value, David Bazan will be narrating the End Of Days half asleep next to a humming amp. And you would think these guys would know better than to ladle a song called "Tryptophan" on this platter-- especially when it's acoustic and comes at the midpoint of an experience that often feels like freebasing raw, uncut tedium.
