Album
Gengahr
A Dream Outside
June 15 2015 (Transgressive)
6.5/10
Words: Richard O’Hagan
Gengahr are one of those bands who effortlessly pull off the trick of sounding very familiar without actually sticking in the memory at all. That’s not a criticism, it means that the North London four-piece have so successfully tapped into the current trend for guitar-based winsome burbling that they’ve managed to do the musical equivalent of joining a conversation at a party even though no-one realised you were there before.
Their first and current singles, ‘She’s A Witch’ and ‘Heroine’ respectively, both feature prominently at the start of this 11-track debut album, although really all that they do is provide a cosy introduction to Felix Bushe’s at times strained falsetto and otherworldly musings. Better still are ‘Embers’, with Danny Ward’s drums set to a military tattoo that for once presents them as a counterpoint to everything else that is going on, and the high spot of the album, the rockier ‘Powder’, in which the guitars come to the fore to produce what could almost be a modern take on Dinosaur Jr’s ‘Start Choppin’.
There’s a huge ‘but’ heading in this direction, though. Like so many modern acts (and we do see rather a lot of them here) Gengahr have found a formula and stuck to it religiously throughout this album, meaning that there is little to differentiate between the tracks as whole. In today’s climate, where getting the money to record and release anything is hard, it is difficult to criticise such a safety-first approach, but at the same time the risk to it is that record labels realise that you could get the same effect for less money just by releasing mini-albums of fewer very good tracks rather than a full album of which around 45% are just filler. Of course, it isn’t fair or reasonable to expect Gengahr to save the music industry from this, but it does mean that ‘A Dream Outside’ becomes rather same-y towards the end.
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