You can’t beat a bit of arthouse pretension when it comes to providing motivation to write yet more words on the wonderful world of music. Extra Life could, can and will be classified as pretentious but, hey, it’s not wrong if you can carry it off and as Dream Seeds” is their third album it is therefore reasonable to assume that they know what they are doing.
It is not hard to work out that “Dream Seeds” is something akin to a concept album. In that way, it seems a touch dated as if inspired equally by existential theatre and the Electric Light Orchestra. So, there is no shortage of bizarre phrases that stick in the mind like the remnants of a mind expanding trip into a land of altered states. We are way off off Broadway here.
My head started to crumble as the intellectual challenge of processing lyrics such as “…where is my wooden club?” and “…make an omelette out of you” collide in the emptiness of, in stylistic terms, mid range Hollywood orchestration. Let not thoughts of a three minute pop songs cross your mind here either as Charlie Locker takes his vocals into the land of second division theatre at the drop of a knitted hat.
“Dream Seeds” will no doubt find its audience and I’m pretty damn certain it won’t be a mainstream one. Nonetheless, points must be awarded for straying from the path of universal acceptance even if I couldn’t really figure what the point, or more correctly concept, was.