Chlorine Dream

The forecast is calling for mental weather. And riding in on a storm of wild sounds, Toronto’s Chlorine Dream brings us their music, imbued with abundant styles that range from space rock to psychedelic music to heavy alt-rock to ambient and even goth rock. But rather than it being a patchwork creation, on Mental Weather, their debut album, they successfully merge those styles into a unique blend of complex rock that can be sometimes mysteriously murky, sometimes mellow and melancholy, and sometimes wild and freaky.

The album opens with the somber and spacey Autonomy where gloomy guitars and droning vocals drenched in creepy electronics create a dark and shadowy atmosphere. Be My Friend, a harsh and blistering rocker with oddly menacing vocals (considering the title!) is a complete contrast, drawing strongly on both the goth and psych influences. The Nashville to Memphis Dialogue shifts in moods as it progresses, from coolly atmospheric piano and softer guitars that make for perfect midnight drive music until they’re interrupted by some sudden and searing electric guitar, ultimately culminating in a tasty, upbeat almost jazzy psychedelic jam to finish things off. Ant Colony opens with nearly 4 minutes of Floydian style atmospheres before a moody guitar enters, building on slow layers till the song breaks into a spacey, rhythmic overdrive full of crashing cymbals. Another standout track is the album closer, Stronger, which rises up from the often more solemn mood of the rest of the album to a romping 60’s style psychedelic rave-up, with a hint of gospel flavor coming from the very cool, funky organ and slide guitar.

Chlorine Dream’s sound is diverse and not always immediately accessible, but that’s one of its strong points. It’s the kind of music that grows on you, revealing new dimensions every time you tune into it.

- Reviewed by Jeff Fitzgerald - Aural Innovations

The most interesting head music being made these days is coming from Canada. Toronto's Chlorine Dream is but one of many music collectives pushing the limits of the genre. Where CD differs from their Montreal based brethren like Silver Mt. Zion, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, et al, is their immediate embracing of modern psychedelic sounds. From the first song, "Autonomy," the listener is swirled in a chanted vocal buoyed by some burbling keyboard that expands and recedes. CD is also not pursuing a political agenda, other than cracking open your brain.

On the second cut, "Be My Friend," CD reveal a kinship with the krautrock / kosmische musik movement that flared briefly and then vanished in late 60s Germany. The guitars wail with acid rock fury, and the keyboards embroider everything with a Ray Manzarek-on-acid (when wasn't Manzarek on acid?) pattern. CD set the controls for the heart of psychedelic. They take minutes to get to the chorus and burnish everything with surreal soloing, each instrument weaving in and out of the other. It calls to mind work by Ash Ra Tempel and Guru Guru, two of the more acid-drenched and guitar-feedback krautrock bands.

If you timed your drugs for the needle drop of side one, by track 3, CD knows you're ready to recline on the couch and contemplate infinity. Here, they come on like hypnotic Pink Floyd, punctuating quiet passages with a blast from an angry Les Paul. It also sounds like the drummer hits his cymbals with brushes or pads, which washes the song in a brassy vibrato, the high end tumbling over instead of crackling instantly, as you get when someone bashes their cymbals indiscriminately. The conclusion of this song, "The Nashville To Memphis Dialogue," closes the door on the Floydian trip and becomes a Doors tribute, the band shifting into uptempo high gear and following a lilting and insistent keyboard riff to the 9 minute finish line.

The rest of the album is a similar tour of the solar system right from your own sofa. CD melds the mind expanding experiments of 60s acid and krautrock with a modern refinement that avoids the embarrassing excesses of either genre while providing a good headtrip for the adventurous.

-Reviewed by Paul Leeds
- Culture Bunker

Am I imagining things or is it safe to say that the era of hippies, heads and Merry Pranksters, with their corresponding consciousness-expanding drugs, has passed? Because at some point in the midst of my successive coke, crank, X and meth binges, plain ol' acid seems to have become so passé. And now, listening to Toronto's Chlorine Dream, which sounds remarkably like the aural equivalent of a pleasantly mellow acid trip, all I can think about is this strange tangent: what happened to LSD?

Not that it matters all that much, really, since acid's legacy carries on. And far more important than all the aging, spaced-out hippies who have flashbacks every time they bend over to velcro their shoes, are the musical contributions of that classic late-sixties/early-seventies drug -- as eloquently honored, for instance, in Mental Weather. With their unexpected song structures, Morrison-esque vocals and relentless guitar noodling, Chlorine Dream are definitively psych-rock.

The remarkable thing about Chlorine Dream, however, is that they bridge the gap between the drug-comatized music of the sixties and seventies and the ambitious psych-rock aesthetics of, say, the modern day Seattle scene (including Kinski and Voyager One). Apart from the vocals, which sound affectedly disaffected at times, Chlorine Dream pays homage to their psych-rock roots while retaining a good deal of self-determination. It's a musical flashback, borne not out of residual LSD deposits in the spine, but of the consciousness-expanding sounds that accompanied that era.
- Splendid Magazine