Bedroom Walls: All Good Dreamers Pass This Way

iTunes classifies the new Bedroom Walls album as children’s music. Fantastic! Sing along, kids, starting with track one: “In Anticipation of Your Suicide.” I’m not sure how the iTunes program determines genre, but a slight tweak of that system might be in order.

What the music should be called, according to the Bedroom Walls themselves, is ‘romanticore’ - that’s the term they coined for their style of drifting, whispered carnival pop. (On their website they provide a self-aware breakdown of what ‘romanticore’ entails, including “existentialism (ages 17-22)” and “sighing too loudly and too often.”)

Whatever you want to call it, they have perfected it on All Good Dreamers Pass This Way. Like the other bands working in this general area - Camera Obscura and Slow Dazzle, for example - their success depends on tone more than songwriting. It’s a string-laden, Phil Spector, sweet-pop sound, but it’s spookier, hazier, and tranquilized.

These are songs to be sung by a woman wearing bright lipstick in a smoke-filled room with an elegant crowd holding its collective breath. I don’t know who that is slurring her way through the vocal on “Do The Buildings and Cops Make You Smile,” but she (or maybe he) sounds like she’s about to slip into a deep, drug-induced sleep.

Bedroom Walls should offer to paint their producer’s house, wash his car, and take out his trash, because he soaks this album in a gorgeous, eerie sound. It’s consistently weird, but so tightly built, so fundamentally pop, that it never loses you. And if you ignore the subject matter, they are innocent and childlike, so maybe iTunes isn’t completely crazy.

- Tom Vale
Bedroom Walls (Baria Records)