IN A PRACTICE room the size and temperature of a sweat lodge, Mr. Dream rehearses after work. Beads of perspiration bleed through the musicians’ sheer shirts in Williamsburg’s Sound City, and Adam Moerder, the lead singer and guitarist, flops his boyish curls.
“Are you guys cool with the pregnant pause thing?” he asks his two band mates after strumming his last gruff hook.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s funny,” says Nick Sylvester, the drummer, clad in a Vivian Girls T-shirt.
Moerder, Sylvester and bassist Matt Morello work tirelessly in a way that only twenty-somethings can. Although the band’s excited, punkish sound is inspired by groups of its members’ youth—Husker Du and The Wipers pop to mind—the three Ivy League grads brood over the future.These guys obsess about time about as often as Quentin from The Sound and the Fury. Even the band’s name is a caution against wasted time: Mr. Dream is named after Sylvester’s dad, a drummer who never achieved fame and now feels sad as he watches other percussionists “because they’re not him.”
“It’s the hallucination of what could have been, Mr. Dream,” Sylvester says. “It’s an American kind of sadness.”
And it’s a feeling that has permeated plenty of the band’s sound. In the song “Lawnmower Man” off its debut EP, Mr.Dream Goes to Jail, the three-piece band showcases its crunching chords and urgent enunciation: “When we were young/ we fucked and sang and hung,” Morello snarls. “But now we're old/ it's time to cut the grass.”
Morello does an impression of his Mom hearing, “fuck the kids” for the first time. In a breathy voice, he says, “We never said that to you or your sister.”Thankfully, Mr. Dream doesn’t just practice, write and rage against the dying of the light to please parents. Actually, the band does it to “fuck the kids,” in the dismissive sense—after all, this is their decade of selfishness.
“If you want to put yourself first when you have kids, that’s just wrong,” Sylvester says.The band members say that they think of life as a race, and in the lap between childhood and parenthood, they have to finish self-centered achievements. “Once you put it into perspective, you’re racing against the clock,” Moerder adds.
Appropriately enough, Moerder and Sylvester—who met as writers at The Harvard Lampoon—grew close while, you guessed it, running together. Supposedly, Moerder took Sylvester on his first jog along the Charles River.
“Did you run with one big iPod?” Morello jokes.
“Actually, we synced his iPod and my CD player,” Sylvester says.
“Are you serious?” “Yeah. At a minute-fifteen, I just lost it and Adam kept running.”
Sylvester and Moerder remain just as competitive in the practice room. “I could play music for 24 hours,” Sylvester says, “but I couldn’t handle writing four hours without checking the Internet.”
“I could,” Moerder mumbles. They all push each other to improve. After Morello experiments with bass lines, he selfconsciously asks the others if he sounds “too SST,” the record label of Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.
Mr. Dream’s members say many of their favorite bands began as barebones rock groups like themselves.They embrace the DIY aesthetic on their self-recorded album, and view their strapped resources as a challenge.
“We’re feeling in a more primitive state than Grizzly Bear or LCD Soundsystem,” Sylvester says. “We can’t do what they do because we haven’t been working with software. Aim low, we figure.
“Part of it is the power of simplicity, too.
It’s the original head space that punk came out of.”
To set itself apart, Mr. Dream has a solution as simple and undeniable as its catchy riffs.
“We’re under the impression that if we write enough good songs,” Morello says, “then, eventually, people will like them.” For Mr. Dream, hard work is the answer, and pay-by-the-hour practice time is measured in sweat.
> Mr. Dream
Oct. 29, The Alphabet Lounge, 104 Ave. C. (at E. 7th St.), 212-780-0202; 9, $TBA
