Time For Dreams, a Melbourne duo of Amanda Roff (The Drones/ Harmony) and Tom Carlyon (the Devastations and Standish/Carlyon), create sparse mood music, with plenty of space for reverberations to ring out and settle. Yet even with all this space they can still feel claustrophobic, thanks primarily to their attitude soaked vocals courtesy of Roff. There’s a real Narcotic swagger to their stripped back indie dub. It’s noiresque post punk stripped of its violence, leaving just skeletal remains and moody shimmering vistas.
What’s so fascinating though are the purposely prominent, proudly artificial rickety beats of their drum machine, ensuring everything clips and rollicks along with a gentle though slightly uncomfortable momentum.
Much of the recipe seems to be a big bottom end, courtesy of an immense sounding bass guitar and heavily reverbed everything else, from vocals, to guitar to synth, it’s all at some point drifting away and settling somewhere between the bars.
It’s refreshingly original music, Roff’s vocals in particular are incredibly evocative and incredibly disparate, from a fragile whisper to a high pitch squeal or full emotional heavily reverbed singing, the different vocal timbre and tonalities really serve to differentiate the songs and place them in their own unique worlds. And whilst you can hear elements of everything from Portishead to HRTK in their neo electronic torch songs, their loping beats and washed out frequencies, the duo are all about mood, about putting the listener into a steamy unsettling distinctively urban new world.
