Melbourne based dream pop duo VHS Dream have truly delivered the goods with their creamy and alluring new album, Departure.
Bursting with transcendent builds and floating reverb, this is the dreamscape you always imagined. The new collection of sultry jams take you to a happy place you didn’t even know existed.
Departure is an artistic expression, through and through. VHS Dream have allowed each and every intricacy of the minimal record to speak volumes.
When I first heard it I was on a business* trip in Canberra, where I needed all the escapism I could find, VHS delivered and I forgot how close I was to our capital’s political fuckery and greyness for 45 whole minutes.
The opening track AEIOU is soft, and consistent, with little lilts towards deep oceanic echoes, it is clean and beautifully crafted. Come Around and Sleep follow, with more vocal depth and complexity, both add to an already solid compendium of soft subtlety.
Let’s face it, this album is pretty much perfect to get high to. Not that I condone drug use of any kind, but if you are in the mood for a bubble bath, a bowl of cereal and a bong simultaneously, this is the album that was made for you.
Listening to Departure is not so much an experience of music, as a catalyst of reflection and observation. In exploring the album, I found myself drawn to certain elements of my surroundings. Without trying to make myself sound like less of a stoner wanker, it built on the experience I was already having.
So much of music takes you to somewhere else, to forget or to replace. VHS Dream touches on simple beats and carrying melodies that slip into your mind with ease and grace.
Running takes you on a totally new journey, foggy and upbeat, it’s a bold take on static noise. The track is short, but punctuates the album at just the right moment.
The whole album is tied together by a theme of loss. The intention for each track to build and develop into darker and darker spaces is well articulated and unmissable. VHS Dream delivers a journey, deeply emotion and personal, Departure is a mature expansion to the work that these guys have already produced.
I would 100% recommend listening to the album as a whole from beginning to end, it is as artful as anything I have heard in a long, long time, each track building and drawing upon the one before, it is a complete piece and should be respected as such.
Calming, complex and perfectly just as it is, unmasked by exaggeration, VHS have delivered, in Departure, an album of wonder and escape. The expansive record is out June 17th.
Ed: *Business trip you say?
