While you're over there on Bandcamp today spending money on artists and labels getting all of the profits today, as Bandcamp has been doing lately, please buy the new EP from Peel Dream Magazine. It's a surprise release, one whose very existence was a secret until today for most people. Moral Panics is the name of this one and it's another in a string of superb offerings from this group.
"New Culture" purrs with the sort of mechanical fuzz we heard on the earliest Stereolab singles, and some My Bloody Valentine ones, while the lovely "Dialectics" marries that sort of thing to the kind of riff that Ride might have used in 1990. Elsewhere, "The Furthest Nearby Place" is elegant and composed, the flip-side in mood and vibe of the other selections here, and an indication, along with the languid "Life at the Movies" that this band has been listening to old Unrest and Yo La Tengo records along with all those MBV and 'Lab ones.
Peel Dream Magazine continue to surprise and impress. Moral Panics is a delight, of course, even if the pleasures feel like familiar ones. Still, as this band continues to crank out material, one detects moments where this sound becomes their own, and how amid the reverence for past pioneers something melodic and fresh continues to stir. The music of this group excites me even as I recognize all the buttons they're pushing. Their refinement of these styles is so spot-on, so precisely rendered, that any criticism would seem petty.
Moral Panics is out today via the link below.
More details on Peel Dream Magazine via the band's official Facebook page.
[Photo: Ming Wu]