Lost in the Dream is an album that sounds exactly like its title suggests — a record caught between waking and sleeping, between clarity and fog, between the desire to move forward and the gravitational pull of the past. Adam Granduciel spent two years making this album, reportedly re-recording entire songs dozens of times, and you can hear both the obsessive attention to detail and the toll that obsession took in every note.
The guitar tones are magnificent. Granduciel achieves a sound that is simultaneously huge and delicate — layers of clean arpeggios, heavily chorused lead lines, and walls of harmonic feedback that create a sonic landscape as wide and empty as the American heartland the music evokes. "Red Eyes" builds from a single, pulsing synthesizer note into a nine-minute epic of cascading guitars and driving rhythms that channels Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" era through a thick fog of studio effects.
The production is the album's greatest strength and its most significant liability. Every sound has been sculpted with painstaking care — the way reverb tails overlap, the precise moment where a guitar drone swells into audibility, the subtle modulations of the synthesizer pads that provide the harmonic foundation. But this level of attention can occasionally tip into indulgence. At sixty-four minutes, the album tests the listener's patience, particularly in its middle section where "Suffering" and "An Ocean in Between the Waves" cover similar emotional and sonic territory.
The rhythm section anchors everything with a steady, motorik pulse that owes something to krautrock and something to Petty's Heartbreakers. The drums are crisp and driving without ever becoming aggressive, providing the forward momentum that the guitar textures might otherwise lack.
Granduciel's voice — a reedy, Dylan-inflected murmur — is mixed deep into the arrangements, becoming another texture rather than a focal point. His lyrics deal with depression and anxiety with an obliqueness that mirrors the music's hazy sonics. Lost in the Dream is a flawed but frequently gorgeous record, and when it works — on "Red Eyes," "Under the Pressure," and the devastating title track — it is among the most emotionally resonant rock music of the decade.
