ALBUM REVIEW: Dreamstate by Kelly Lee Owens
I wanna dance with Kelly
I’m sure everyone’s heard Charli XCX’s demanding chant “I wanna dance to me, I wanna dance to A.G., I wanna dance with George” on the track “Club Classics,” the second song off of Brat, her latest album released earlier this year that took the summer by storm. A.G. refers to A.G. Cook, her creative director, producing many of the album’s tracks. Now, you may ask, who’s George, and why does Charli want to dance with him?
George is George Daniel, the drummer of the band The 1975, the fiancé of Charli XCX, and the lead of Dirty Hit’s new electronic-focused imprint label, dh2. dh2 was formed this summer with an official launch party on July 11th in London. The party’s stacked line-up included Daniel himself as well as Kelly Lee Owens, the Welsh musician who bestowed the label with its inaugural record on October 18th, titled Dreamstate.
Although Dreamstate is dh2’s first album, Owens has already proven to be a fierce creator, having released three albums on Smalltown Supersound, remixing for Björk, Jenny Hval, and St. Vincent, and playing bass in the early 2010s with English indie rock outfit The History of Apple Pie. However, Dreamstate shows off a glistening new color palette, delectably fusing pop and techno to create a beautifully buoyant record. Owens settles in on the first song, “Dark Angel,” taking flight with 360-degree soundscapes, following it up with “Dreamstate,” conjuring the musical universe aforementioned in the album’s title. Owens’s intention with the title track was to create a mantra-like atmosphere, facilitating the transcendence of listeners into her ether.
Continuing further into the album, Owens begins to turn her energy up and temperature down, departing from her previous moodier style for an icy club-commanding delivery. The pulsing “Love You Got” and the misty “Rise” both feature Owens’s vocals cooly casting verses on desire and euphoria. This greater plurality of lyrics is a new quality that enhances her venture into her maturation of style, her silky voice complementing her production aptly. The churning snappy synths on “Sunshine” and “Time To”’s paced jungle backbone exhibit Owens’s mastery of communicating synergy through direction, creating breezy yet steely highlights on the album. Owens continues to pave her sonic world on “Ballad (In The End),” her billowing vocals ensnaring listeners in its lush undertow, similar to the album’s final track, “Trust and Desire,” Owens lending her voice on both to introspectively reveal her most organic self.
Dreamstate depicts Kelly Lee Owens acclimatizing to the dreamstate she’s always wanted to burst into, bringing us along with her. After delicious records featuring her understanding of brain-melting techno landscapes, Owens plunges into her most comfortable sound yet, establishing dh2 with conviction and birthing a new set of club classics. She’s the one we’ll be dancing to all autumn long.
(by Kasen Korstanje)
