words by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
It’s not dreamgaze music — with copious blurs and bleeds and the visual equivalent of a Windows Media Player ambiance gone haywire.
Instead, Underwater Dream Machine knows that dreams can feel quite real. On his third album, Omaha’s Brett Vovk introduces some nuclei to his songs. Musically, it’s his sticky whisper (sometimes turned growly). Lyrically, it’s summer strolls, folk tales and Buddhism.
That’s to say there is a certain groundedness to Can You See Behind The Moon. The moongazer — as the album cover might suggest — may be imaginative or drifting in a bobbing current. But he is still standing in his rowboat on planet earth. He is still recording in a living room.
The 8-track album — coincidentally recorded on an 8-track cassette machine in Omaha — is Vovk’s third, arguably his most relaxed at the same time as it’s his least preconceived. Before the album release earlier this summer, Vovk told Hear Nebraska that both lyrics and the melodies on the album arrived in him mind by way of his subconscious. Or perhaps Vovk is practicing a bit of artistic impressionability akin to the emptiness of Buddhist enlightenment alluded to on album’s last track.
Vovk is joined on the record by a supporting cast of musicians including John Klemmensen, Morgan Wright, Colin Charles Duckworth, Edward Spencer and Reagan Roeder. In that each of the eight dreams on Can You See Behind the Moon has a star and a focal point that typically starts with Vovk, trumpets, harmonicas and noise guitars flesh out the set of the visions but never rush forward for attention.
In the sense that’s it a highly palatable pop record, the mystery of the dreams on Can You See Behind The Moon is that after a few minutes, they end.
Listen here for the full album review podcast, and see Underwater Dream Machine tonight at Barley Street Tavern as Vovk and Nick Carl begin a 23-date tour:
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. All credit to that living room. Seems like a pretty acoustic one. Reach Chance at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.