Dear Diary
IT SEEMS INEVITABLE now. Every year, a relatively unknown band (like 300 fans on MySpace unknown) takes the NYC Popfest stage and captures enough of the weekends zeitgeist to get everyone talking. This years contender is called Dream Diary. Led by front man Jacob Danish Sloan, a charming and sensitive type, the band splits the difference between jangly twee acts and pure unabashed 60s pop groups like The Supremes or stuff Phil Spector produced before he became a freakazoid murderer with awesome hair.
Calling from outside his day job helping publish conspiracy theory books, Sloan and I discuss how he got into DIY recording, why The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is so influential right now and how many indie pop acts stray too far from actual pop music.
For our songs, its just about trying to fit in that simple indie pop tradition, explains Sloan. Our available songs are just bedroom recordings with no outside help in terms of recording it or anything like that. For our EP on the way, we recorded that ourselves and got a little bit of help mixing it.
Dream Diary came together last summer and Sloan has made sure to keep everything marinating slowly as to avoid unnecessary hype. Thus far, the groups tracks linger online and remain hard to find if, like me, you easily get sucked into tutorials on lucid dreaming. The band is currently hard at work on its first, still-untitled EP and has already been talking to some of the labels youd expect. After pop festivals in both New York City and San Francisco, Ill wager that number should grow pretty rapidly.
I feel like, when I started doing my own bedroom recordings, I didnt really think there was anyone in New York who would necessarily be into it, Sloan reflects. It wouldnt go over with bearded lumberjack people or Lower East Side electro people. When bands like The Pains of Being Pure at Heart came out, it was the signal that there actually was a community for that kind of stuff. I always thought the kind of music we made would only go over in places like Glasgow or Sweden.
So yes, you can file Dream Diary as one of the post-Pains bands. Sloans peers (groups like Knight School and Big Troubles) all operate with a similarly formal DIY ethos. This means market popularity matters less than friends and community. C86 bands reign supreme. Brian Wilson is either genius or God and the grittier elements of music that descend from the American blues are scrapped for emotional honesty and dreamy textures.
I think its trying to find the common thread from The Supremes to 80s music like The Go-Betweens, says Sloan. The common thread is music thats not bluesy or scratchy or abrasive at all. Its about harmonies and chiming notes and that kind of sensibility. That would be the one thing where all of our influences merge together.
Is He Really Mine combines all of these influences and features unabashed trebly guitars and hyper melodic leads. Its like a slower version of a Smiths song as far as production, songwriting and deliberately ambiguous confusion of gender and sexuality. Something Tells Her takes the formula a step further. The guitars shimmer so much that they sound closer to steel drums bleeding all over the mix. For Sloan, this sort of artful mixing separates Dream Diary from the predominant lo-fi style that has surfaced in Brooklyn in recent years. With such focus on relationships and wispy emotion, it might be more appropriate to call the bands initial recordings love-fi instead.
Its weird to me that bands go for such a sloppy lo-fi thing always when you have the ability to do something more ambitious now, he concludes. Its not really a matter of working with what you have because you could have more if you want. For us, its a battle between not going insane with layers. I dont think recordings are supposed to sound like a band does live. The magic of really good pop music is always that you didnt know how they did it and you couldnt even tell where one instrument ended and the next began. For me, thats the magical thing about recording.
>> DREAM DIARY June 10, Silent Barn, 915 Wyckoff Ave. (betw. Hancock St. & Jefferson Ave.), Queens, no phone; 8, $TBA.
So very dreamy: Dream Diary.