Dredg
El Cielo (2002)

review by: Matthew Scrivner
Date: 5/6/03

It's taken me almost a month of continual listening to actually put language to this album. The reason is the intensely dreamlike quality to the music. And this is no coincidence. Between the weird liner notes and the lyrics, the whole album turns out to be a concept album about sleep paralysis, a real-life condition of waking nightmare marked by temporary physical paralysis and feelings of deeply disturbing foreboding. Juxtaposed to this is a secondary set of lyrical imagery about suburbia, about the mundanity of daily life, as if to imply living is itself a state of sleep paralysis, and it's just a matter of time until the paralysis-inducing brain hormones wear off and we wake up.

Topical material like this could make for one extremely cheesy Pink Floydesque concept-album cliché, but Dredg pull it off by keeping things intimate, fresh, and strange in a way that never occurred to Roger Waters. Examples of this strange are the lead singer singing quietly in one ear while the same lyrics are literally whispered, just underneath normal volume range, in the other. The first time I heard this, I was listening on headphones in the dark of my bedroom and it chilled me.

The general tonal quality here, as well as the extended, interlacing structure of all the songs seems to shun the theatrics and drama common to most concept albums. The music is careful, gentle, and warm, and when it does build and climax, it is done with an element of natural inevitability, like the crashing of a wave. The result is music that doesn't so much manipulate your emotions as it does your underlying mood.

In the end, this album was good enough that I've been searching local record stores for their previous release, Leitmotif. Which is a bit of an intimidating title if you ask me since, being enough of a true music fan, I can tell you I even know what that word means. Though I think it might do Dredg an extreme disservice to compare them to the operas of Wagner.