Staff Reviews

Sauna Youth - Dreamlands

Review by Noel Gardner

For an album chiefly given over to quick, simple-pleasure garage punk bashers, Dreamlands is not one for easy answers.»

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an evolving band of young future humans making truly irregular punk not quite comparable to anything else. the band, attracted to the possibilities apparent within a diy philosophy have been self-recording and self-releasing their own music since 2010, creating a number of seven inches, splits and cassettes. 'dreamlands' will be the band's first long-player, marking the mutation of their sound and a new line-up. 'weird' is a meaningless platitude, and 'art punk' is a classifier that shouldn't be required. sauna youth journey into the far-reaching wilds of the unfolding psyche and feast on the chaos within, quickly collapsing any pre-conceived notions within minutes of impolite introduction. the lp is a lyrical commentary on being addicted to the distractions preventing engagement with real life; unbreakable routines, relationships based on silence and mindless sex, repetitive and superficial
interaction. this is not a dull lecture on disaffection, it is the dawning realisation in hundred-mile-anhour downstrokes, hypnotic samples going off like permanent alarms and competing vocals. the 5 track offering, found on the b-side, commences with a furious and bracing rush of noise bearing a dissatisfied narrative. %u2018planned designs%u2019 leads with the dissection of artistic conventions and a treatise on space, the space we inhabit and the space we can alter and form for our own needs and desires, a dual-vocal declaring, 'works of art of nothing/works of art from nothing/works of art of nothing but works of art.../we want somewhere to play'. a collective frustration reigns; it rings from the impulsive, fizzing spill of 'snapback', gathering in the blunt pace of 'psi girls'; an eloquent reflection of the lost ability to communicate. the careering 'viscount discount' chronicles the trap of enforced life choices ('remits, compromise, boxes to tick/straight, narrow, guidelines, rules cut to fit/there's a mind just disengaged') and all accumulates with the knowing desperation of 'hairstyles', darkly delivered over the hardest unrelenting 4/4 backbeat.
description from www.roughtrade.com