The Dream Walker (studio album) by Angels & Airwaves

It has its moments. It seems to be underrated by some and overrated by others. Ilan Rubin has been a breath of fresh air, as his noir-synthetic sound has freshened up AVA's music. I also do appreciate that Tom is trying to infuse his raw, punk roots into the spacey aesthetic of Angels and Airwaves.

The production is really awkward and the album has no real cohesion from song-to-song. You can tell pretty much from the first few seconds whether each track is a Tom song or Ilan song. Tom's pop punk dittys like "Bullets In The Wind" and "Paralyzed" line up awkwardly next to the dark synthetic tracks like "The Wolfpack" or "Kiss With A Spell". And then the album closes with a very strangely implemented acoustic track (Anomaly) and while it's a good song, it feels like a gratuitous folksy token-ballad amidst a creepy science fiction landscape. It just doesn't fit.

I feel like Angels and Airwaves needs to find a better equilibrium between Ilan's dreamy synth elements and Tom's raw punk edge. They find it a few times on tracks like "Teenagers & Rituals" and "The Disease" but they should have made an entire album out of it -- it's too jarring and inconsistent to see these punk and electronic tracks lined up next to each other. However, I think they end up accomplishing this on the subsequent two EPs (Of Nightmares and Chasing Shadows) so I am excited to see what we will get next from them.

Love Part Two did nothing for me, so this by default was a step forward. That said, it still gets nowhere close to the first two AVA records. Honestly, the best songs to come out of these sessions were "The Fighting Season" and "Into the Night" and they didn't even make the record.

Highlights: Tunnels, The Wolfpack, Teenagers & Rituals

From Kamens 09/15/2016 05:09

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