For their fifth album,
Mint Julep -- the married duo of
Keith (aka
Goldmund and
Helios) and
Hollie Kenniff -- embrace denser, hazier textures explored but not sustained on its more dance-oriented predecessors. That's not to say that it's not still dance- and sway-friendly, rather that the descriptively titled
In a Deep and Dreamless Sleep is more suggestive of a drugged-out, somnambulant state than a set of pop songs. Despite gaps between tracks, it goes so far as to play almost like 45-minute continuous mix. The album opens with strummed acoustic guitar, dampened rim shots, bass guitar, and an audible static hiss on the slow-building "A Rising Sun." It eases listeners into layers of guitar, swirly synths, humming low tones, and increasingly indecipherable lyrics. Much like the album's title, songs such as the shimmery "Mirage" and more percussive "In the Ocean" are as sonically descriptive as they are evocative with overlapping textures, including
Hollie Kenniff's breathy voice subtly trading emphasis in the mix without ever fading into something perceived as a background. A track like "Longshore Drift" begins relatively sparsely, with a low, throbbing tone and arpeggiated keyboard before echoing, murmured vocals and submerged, dolphin-like interjections start to fill in available spaces. After establishing an insistent eighth-note rhythm that anchors the track to Earth, "Pulse" likewise expands into a web of contrastingly soft and distorted tones. The collective result is often exquisite, and
In a Deep and Dreamless Sleep's subtle changes in tempo, rhythm, and sophisticated timbres provide enough movement to soothe rather than bore. ~ Marcy Donelson