I have always been a person who judges books by their covers and Dreamwell’s Modern Grotesque is no exception. Running orange and white and black, diluting to yellow, almost burnt in some places, bubbling – not quite a shape, not quite nothingness, but the swell of colors melt together to visualize emotions. The album title appears in a square of letters that don’t quite match up – MOD ERNG ROTE SQUE. Back in February, during the pre-order, I wishlisted this album but never listened to it, which seems to be the only way I can find anything at all in 2021.
Modern Grotesque begins with soft guitar and reverberated pads. Then, screaming – far away – for a minute and a half. While this is a very apt mood setter for the album that follows, and a track that leads seamlessly into the next, it could have easily been in the middle of the album (or at the end, for that matter).
My introduction to screamo/post-hardcore was the My Fictions / Aviator split, which Wes thought I would like. At the time, I was straddling Boston hardcore acts like Have Heart and deathcore beatdown bands like Emmure. But Aviator was different. Longtime readers/listeners will be very familiar with how we both feel about Aviator (a seemingly annual mourning ritual we both parade out for our listeners whether they like it or not!), so to say that Dreamwell accurately captures the feeling I had when I first heard Aviator is extremely high praise. It would be hard for me to describe the sense of excitement with every new track that came on as I ticked through this album.
The third track, “Sayaka,” reminded a lot of reviewers of La Dispute, but I feel that misses a far more interesting aspect of both the vocal performance and the song writing. There is a moment, at 1:38, where I am convinced Tool’s “Sober” was expertly slipped in for twenty seconds. What the fuck? I had backed the track up many times. It’s not the same. But it feels the same. It hits me so hard in the back of the head that I am back at a childhood friend’s house watching the Tool music video collection after his parents went to bed. The bass runs with the drums as the guitar pushes out ethereal single note melodies. But then the groove breaks down and the guitar melody gets faster. The vocals, too, remind me of Tool in that moment: “I need someone to believe in, because I need someone to betray.” What is amazing to me about this section of the song is that, without feeling awkward or messy or out of place, what follows both reminds me of La Dispute and AFI. For a moment, a characteristically similar Davey Havok-like, high-pitched section takes us to the edge of the breakdown, to a one-word turn. The emotionality of the vocal style is never lost as it twists and turns through the different moments in the song (or throughout the album). They become a part of the vulnerability in a way that feels natural.
The album progresses, effortlessly, like the art of the album cover. Influences spill and blend into each other, burning at the edges – creating something new. While I find the listed influences for Modern Grotesque truly fascinating (thanks to this extensive IDIOTEQ.com article, where vocalist Keziah Staska reference Daughters’ You Won’t Get What You Want as a massive influence on writing and vocal style), they can only be a vessel for what makes this album bleed emotional depth. Like so many of the bands they credit, Dreamwell isn’t here to hide deeply personal elements of their life. Sometimes it is steeped in metaphor, like in “Plague Father, Vermin Son,” when Staska sings: “This anxiety’s a black stone you vomited out when you swallowed your children. You must have engraved the worst parts of you in my bones.” But sometimes it is more direct, like in “Painting Myself A Darker Day,” in a long line of screaming comes: “I'm just nervous for the future. Exhausted by the present. Hands are shaking and always on the verge of beating myself into the ground where I can get some sleep. I'm so desperate for sleep.”
Wes and I only made it to one Aviator show before they disbanded. If shows ever return in a real way, and Dreamwell somehow makes it from Rhode Island to the West Coast, I will not be making that mistake again. Modern Grotesque, played start to finish, gets me so amped to bang my head that it's hard for me to even imagine how wild the live experience will inevitably be.
Dreamwell managed to capture everything about my favorite bands and distill it into a release that feels both nostalgic and progressive. From riff-heavy bangers like “Painting Myself A Darker Day” to the peak-Aviator meets Our Lady sad chaos of the titular track, Modern Grotesque is an album that greatly rewards multiple listens. While a lot of the core members worked on their debut album, The Distance Grows Fonder, Dreamwell has made something entirely new with their sophomore release. I would have been perfectly happy with a very competent screamo album (which I think their debut album is), but Dreamwell have shown us that there’s more to be made of the genre yet.
Modern Grotesque was independently published by Dreamwell. You can find it on Bandcamp.