Damn, I’m remixing my dreams again and, in the process, making sense of “Andrew R. Burns and The Tropicanas”. When I say making sense, I am, in fact, talking nonsense as the drifting melodic melancholy of said band’s “Dreamslop” EP has little to do with reason.
There are, for practical and philosophical purposes, only three songs here but all seem to be the result of a dirty needle and a Bacharach obsession. The sound is lo-fi and cursed, in a good way, with the kind of misdirected crooning and inflected anguish that suggest that the journey to Livingston is a less spiritual than the one that takes you all the way to San Jose. None of these songs are actually long but all ramble with the insistence that only love and the consequential love of lo-fi reverb can bring. In days gone by, or at least in days before that last arrest for a public order offence, the cognoscenti amongst you might even consider “Stinking Ship” and “Slackjaw” as a sarcastic reflection on loungecore and its cocktail drinking proponents.
With their “Dreamslop” EP, Andrew R. Burns and The Tropicanas take their particular brand of musical misdirection and prove, once more, that the song is where it is at.