Despite its romanticized splendor, there’s an uncomfortable reality buried beneath the roaring crowds and the variegated lights of the musician’s life on the road.
Friends and family are left behind in pursuit of the performer’s dream: an intoxicating rush of personal exorcism and surging creativity delivered through strummed guitars and soaring voices.
Enter Adam Granduciel, whose return from a year-long tour found him enveloped within the thick fog of alienation. Friends turned into silhouettes as the joys of homecoming became fleeting vapor trails along familiar city streets.
It’s an astonishing achievement, then that Granduciel’s third album refuses to slip into the mire of morbid self-pity. Instead, the record feels like the aftermath – a hard-fought deliverance from personal hell.
Channeling classic, pastoral Americana and an astral, hazy ambiance, “Lost in the Dream” isn’t just a kaleidoscopic road trip through the American heartland: it’s a journey into Granduciel himself.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of “Lost in the Dream’s” sound is its accurate namesake. Throughout the record, Granduciel launches American icons such as Bruce Springsteen into the orbit of 90s shoegaze, crafting a consistently compelling atmosphere.
In “Under the Pressure,” synthesizers swell in waves around sparse piano notes as a driving drumbeat leads the track through earthen tones of swirling greens and muted browns.
Granduciel’s return to everyday life is painfully vivid as he sings “Lying in a ditch / pissing in the wind / lying on my back / loosening my grip / wading in the water / just trying not to crack / under the pressure.”
Elsewhere, Granduciel opens the emotional floodgates with “Eyes to the Wind,” where vibrant acoustics lead the listener through weathered, rustic roads before giving way to a euphoric conclusion colored by the exhaling of a saxophone.
But that victory didn’t come without a fight: “there’s a cold wind blowing down my old road / down the backstreets where the pines grow / as the river splits the undertow / but I’d be lying to myself if I said I didn’t mind.”
That fight is exactly what makes Lost in the Dream so emotionally resonant; every chord change, every surge of synth – it all comes from a place we’ve been before.
When Granduciel confesses “Just wanna lay in the moonlight / see the light shine in, see you in the outline / it never gets too dark to find / Anybody at anytime” in “An Ocean Between the Waves,” the brilliance of “Lost in the Dream” hits you, and you realize that you’ve been lost in it too.
Granduciel’s plunge into his deepest emotional wells has undoubtedly turned out for the best – not just for his personal catharsis, but also for his audience. 2011’s Slave Ambient, as fantastic as that album is, felt too reserved to consistently make deep, decisive cuts to the heart.
With Lost in the Dream, however, Granduciel has thrown his insecurities like javelins to the wind, piercing and with pinpoint precision. And we’re eager to take the hits, because by day’s end the rush of rejuvenation awaits.
Maybe, then, getting lost isn’t so bad after all.
Release Date: March 13, 2014
Grade: B
Verdict: Adam Granduciel has crafted a penetrating ode to isolation that rises above its negative emotional space
