If the highly suspicious bio behind Brooklyn cuddle-wavers Dream Diary is indeed 100% factual, then at least give them credit for hitting the indie pop jackpot of creation tales. According to PR lore, band founder Jacob Danish Sloan, a disillusioned former child prodigy of the upright bass who had a really strong desire to be a rhythm guitarist, bumped into bandmate Madison Farmer while walking along Manhattan's decidedly downtown Essex Street. Both of their iPods were playing the Smiths' The Queen Is Dead-- still unconfirmed if they were also carrying identical copies of The Perks of Being a Wallflower-- and bam, a band was born. They found their drummer, Alexander Iezzi, in a bar, less interestingly (and probably more true).
If you read that tale as a piece of unintentional indie pop parody, you're not to blame. The fibers of ridiculousness strengthen when putting on Dream Diary's debut LP, We Are the Beat. From the opening six-stringed chimes of "Paper Flowers", it's clear that we have our first post-Pains of Being Pure at Heart act of 2011. Granted, Pains aren't exactly bastions of originality either-- which is exactly what makes Dream Diary's copy-of-a-copy shtick so hide-your-eyes embarrassing. That, and Sloan's vocals; his thin-lipped, super-affected delivery makes the entire Slumberland batting order look like a bunch of Pavarottis, as it swallows words and obscures sentiments. Not that the lyrical content here is particularly deserving of close analysis; selected song titles ("Something Tells Her", "She Has a Way") suggest that this record sort of wrote itself. Still, it's hard to believe that in the process of writing and recording "Audrey of Spirits", no one pointed out that Sloan's storybook coo makes his pre-chorus utterance sound a whole lot like "Suckin' your penis."
The reasonable improvement that could be made to We Are the Beat, then, would be to ditch the singer-- because when he's imaginarily removed from the proceedings, there's really nothing else that's going horribly wrong here. Parts are played, the production is well-executed, and there are even a few decently catchy melodies (the descending mini-fantasia of "Something Tells Her", the clean shoegaze structure of "Young Veronica"). Not even a single bookish hair is out of place here, which in a way makes Dream Diary's place in the still-going Slumberland Revivalist arena that of Longwave's in the early-aughts Manhattan Rock Explosion: slick, competent, and uncanny at turning sounds normally attached to real feelings into something as joyless and workmanlike as waking up for your job in the morning.
