Dream Can

Shanghai, China

Crawling with so many ideas, effects, and layers that it takes a half dozen listens to begin to sink in properly, Dream Can’s fiery, flickering first album will make itself immediately at home in your gray matter. The young Shanghai band name checks all-time psych greats like Acid Mothers Temple among their influences, and that remains apparent from the building space-noise of album opener “Cheap Cheap Time I Live, Money Money Saves Me,” to the dreamlike tape-loop reverie of instrumental number “Gooo,” to the mercurial, virtuosic guitar work on “Kill the Man,” the stunning climax of this enthralling debut.

Dream Can has a softer side on Into Sparks, too, showing tenderness and emotional depth on less scorched tracks like “But I Am a Lonely Girl” and the plaintive closer, “In The Rickety Time” What’s audible throughout the album is the band’s originality, their dedicated and delicate approach to songwriting that has set them apart from their peers in four short years together.

Dream Can’s sound and lyrics are built of chaos, fractured time, the ultimate inability (or refusal) to disentangle dream from reality. But on Into Spark, these talented young artists take the confusion of the age and turn it into something a few steps short of nihilism, something that makes the listener curious to keep going, to hear more. In the words of vocalist and guitarist A Re, “It’s not fear, it's the joy of being free on the edge of the darkness.” (Maybe Mars)