Dead Leaf Echo - Thought & Language

Artist: Dead Leaf Echo

Album: Thought and Language

Label: Neon Sigh

Genre: Shoegaze, dreampop

Dead Leaf Echo, from Brooklyn, have released their first CD Thought and Language. On this record, Dead Leaf Echo have done nothing less than invent and reinvent dreampop.

Filled with echos, ambient sounds, tremelo guitars, Dead Leaf Echo bring a type of shoegaze that is clothed in clouds and still real enough to be touched.

The success of Dead Leaf Echo is represented by them playing at SXSW, and topping the CMJ Top 20 indie charts.

As their bio states: “Dead Leaf Echo incorporate elements of ambient, baroque, dream-pop, shoegaze, new wave, and goth, and craft every aspect of their sound and vision, with high-art as concept. Chiming guitars in twin stereo reverbs with shimmering vocals and silky basslines. Dead Leaf Echo runs the gamut of what is now possible within the contemporary underground and stands out on the NYC indie music scene.”

While the entire album Though and Language brings you in a state of dreamy bliss, there are a few tracks that stand out. There is “Kingmaker”, with its more gothic feel – but it's the type of gothic feeling that comes with daydreaming in a lush bed of moss on a graveyard, filled with autumn sunlight.

“Language of the Waves” sounds like something of The Cure on lots of weed, all mellowed out and padded into clouds of softness and puffiness.

The track “Birth” is infused with longing, and brings back some of the atmosphere that Piano Magic used to bring, as well as some of the more recent work of Anathema. There's a lingering feeling of being in love, just for the sake of falling in love and idealizing the beloved.

The sharpest track comes with “Thought”, where the outro is a little more on the nightmare-ish side, and Antony and the Johnsons seem to loom around the corner.

To sum it all up: if you want to feel the warm embrace of some atmospheric, soothing music that feels like a warm bath on a winter evening, look for Dead Leaf Echo's Thought and Language. Pure indulgence.

Buy Dead Leaf Echo – Kingmaker (single)