click to enlarge - Courtesy
- Noah Kesey, Holding Hands Around the World
(Self-released, CD, cassette, digital)
In my earliest days as a music journalist, I was sent to a songwriter retreat. I was meant to be a fly on the wall, but I ended up just playing a lot of piano while most of the other cabinmates drank mushroom tea.
There was one dude, though — he didn't write anything, either. But he did approach me on the final night to tell me that he wrote music only while lucid dreaming. That notion fascinated me — taking control of your sleeping mind and composing music from the dark side of the brain. I asked to listen to some of his dream music.
Unfortunately, it was just him doing what he described as "ancient chants" over a djembe run through a delay pedal. I politely finished listening to the album, really wishing I'd had some of that tea.
Later, I wondered how I'd actually want an album full of lucid-dream compositions to sound. The closest answer I've found yet is Holding Hands Around the World, the new LP from Burlington songwriter Noah Kesey.
The Woodstock, N.Y., native started out with indie-pop project Full Walrus. Their records showed heaps of promise, specifically the 2019 EP Songs for Other People, which then-Seven Days music editor Jordan Adams described as "a pleasant dream that you can't quite remember, viewed through a heavily greased lens."
After playing on and coproducing Lily Seabird's 2021 LP Beside Myself, Kesey released a pair of solo efforts. The most recent was 2023's Guitar Music, an exciting but raw collection of indie rock. Holding Hands Around the World is another beast altogether — a supremely trippy album built on sinuous melodies and chameleonic genre shifts with a vibrant, beating heart at its center.
After the heavily percussive instrumental piece "Cheetah Print Twin Bed Sheets" opens the LP, the shift to the dream pop of "Dynamite" is almost jarring. "I love watching you explode / You're like heavy metal," Kesey sings in a hushed, reverb-laden voice.
The dreamlike quality of the production is almost certainly intentional. Kesey is a talented producer who sprinkles an early-morning, bleary-eyed haze over his songs like pixie dust, whether it's the jaunty bop of "Backyard" or the distorted krautrocker "Sparkling in the Dancelight." The former's sudden transition from angular rock to '70s-educational-program synth soundtrack at the bridge is some real high-wire-balancing-act shit, but Kesey's music is nothing if not brave.
Perhaps the best example of his fearlessness on Holding Hands is the horny, hallucinatory "Nice to Meet You, Can I Freak You?" Like something out of the Flaming Lips' Clouds Taste Metallic era, Kesey treads the surprisingly fine line between experimental and pop, all with a knowing wink.
Holding Hands Around the World is a glorious collection of music that can soundtrack any manner of dreams, lucid or otherwise. Check it out at noahkesey.bandcamp.com. Kesey and the Noah Kesey Magic Band celebrate the album with a release show this Saturday, March 16, at Light Club Lamp Shop in Burlington.