Coloma always seemed like a group doomed to unfashionability. Six years ago, the duo's second album, Finery, might have seemed like the last word on fusing "microhouse" sonics with, you know, proper songs. But it was simultaneously the first-- and, it turns out, solitary-- word on a return of Tim Rice lyricism to pop: Amazingly, Alex Paulick's ear-tickling technicolor arrangements were less florid than singer Rob Taylor's thesaurus-happy songwriting and mannered Broadway vocals.
So it's not surprising that Coloma's profile has since been almost non-existent, nor that they immediately began to beat a trail away from the startling modernity of their early work and towards a more familiar and comforting "real instruments" sound. Perhaps they've reasoned-- quite sensibly-- that most listeners will only stand for so much scene-stealing idiosyncrasy at once.
On the duo's fourth album, Love's Recurring Dream, the transition from sharply etched micro-pop to billowing chamber-pop is almost complete: The music's organic lines are colored in with jazzy drum fills, maudlin trumpets, even anonymously soulful backing vocals. Nonetheless, even leaving aside Taylor's sore-thumb singing, this is clearly the work of the same group. Guitars, harpsichords, and muted horns may have replaced synth burbles and skittery beats, but the arrangements are still by and large prickly and pointillist, each tiny sound burnished to a dazzling sheen. It's a remarkably neat, punctilious sound; whereas once a slightly buzzy bass line might have suggested a hedonistic looseness lurking under the surface, Love's Recurring Dream's composure remains unruffled throughout, offering only starched shirts as far as the ear can hear.
Coloma's poetic predilections have also been reined in. Once, the duo's songs sounded scripted more than written and performed, complete with stage instructions like "turn to audience" and "exit stage left." Love's Recurring Dream retains some of this air ("You look like a dummy in a shopfront... [dramatic pause]... and I mean that as a compliment"), and Taylor still hasn't overcome his fondness for terrible puns (see the found-sound cod-blues mope "Blue Blood"), but most of the time these songs feel literary rather than verbose, less top-heavy with overblown melodrama than before.
All of which makes Coloma seem much more like other stuff you maybe already know and enjoy. In its softer and more traditional moments, Love's Recurring Dream sounds a great deal like Rufus Wainwright if he spent more time paying tribute to Leonard Cohen than Judy Garland. Taylor has always shared a good deal of Wainwright's declamatory, slightly nasal vocal style and his tendency towards lyrical and performative overreach, but the more subdued, soft-focus arrangements sharpen the echoes of Cohen's patient craft. This is undoubtedly a smarter set of stylistic coordinates for the duo, but it's also a safer one: more agreeable, but less idiosyncratic, and correspondingly less demanding of obsession or even a great deal of repeat-listening.
Still, when the album tries to summon up a mirage of the band's former, electronically charged sound, the results are very good indeed. "Do You Know What It Is Yet?" is charming pastoral-schaffel reminiscent of Borneo & Sporenburg's "Boys in Shorts". "These Days Are Ours" is breathlessly excited, buoyed by airy xylophone runs and a perky rhythm hidden away under a mountain since the late 1980s. The urgent throb of "Standstill" evokes the wide-eyed, widescreen majesty of Simple Minds at their pre-crossover peak. The iridescent echoes of "Tired of Summer" discover an uncharted middle-ground between Bark Psychosis and Basic Channel.
These occasionally magical moments always come as a surprise, as it's hard to accept that the duo could wrest such startling sounds from such familiar tools. If Love's Recurring Dream proves anything, it's that Coloma were never about technology, but rather a sense of otherworldliness, however it might be acheived. Once, they offered a vision of the past as it might appear to people in the future; here, the duo's music sounds like our own past as it might appear in a dream. Like a dream, it retreats quickly into forgetfulness once you emerge from it, but moments of transfixing eeriness linger like a hazy memory of a memory.
