testface, doctor won't you get us to dawn
review by dan jones

Doctor Can You Get Us To Dawn is a psych-folk record, if you need that kind of tag, but this is a SONG/WRITER's album.  Listen to the way the images leap, from ominous to benign. This is a story song album WITH HEART that is not for the FAINT OF HEART, and if you feel shadows moving across your soul while you listen to this, then you're meeting this music halfway, and that's good! You're not just a new waver. It's make-out music for people willing to dive on the darker wrecks of the soul, a dance record for apartment-living insomniacs and anxious gardners, a fiction suite for lonely afternoon naps, a pop poetry album Lorca would have made, if he'd collaborated with Neil Young on Sleeps With Angels, and had Eno produce.  We're talkin', like, glimpses of infinity and intense solitude, but never the abject kind.
 
Indie music is so often defined by some abject (but not necessarily creative) element: hostility or emasculated neutrality or noise or bad drumming or obscurity or hatred of good ol' rock/pop emotion.  Don't-piss-on-the-rug, cliqueish Mormonism re-cast as precious Pottery Barn "post-rock" or whatever the fuck.  What I meant to say before getting derailed by my own opinions and feelings of corn-fed alienation is that this album has class, and ass, and sass, AND it's as hip as anything going.  It's got that hum and sparse, spooky spaciousness to it, but it also has an intelligence and tunefulness and quiet riffy-ness that you can really live inside.  Not riffs that will Ronsonize your cerebellum or live all over you, but riffs all the same.  Hooky ones.
 
Doctor Can You Get Us To Dawn is a cycle of Dave Snider's SONGS, with style and substance, and a certain quality I can only call:  soul.  Meaning, these numbers swing, in an authentic, idiosyncratic way, with a loving earthiness to ground and transform the gloomy ethers.