There’s an old Saturday Night Live skit from the early 90s that’s a bunch of teenagers sitting around bored and trying to come up with something exciting. Figuring out they have no drugs, alcohol, or any way to procure them, one of them suggests starting a band, and they all get excited.

They start at the most obvious first step. I say having been these teenagers: Coming up with a name. They sit around trying to think of a name for the band, throwing out any number of awful ones, then the kid played by Chris Farley shouts, “I’ve got it! Pearl Jam II!”

At first they think it’s great, and then one of them goes, “Wait, but what about Pearl Jam?” and then they all lose their enthusiasm. This is supposed to be ridiculous I think, but listening to the latest album by Dreamweapon, I think it might be possible there was one smart writer in the room who was a music freak and actually knew something about loving music.

From what you can understand as a fan from interviews and reviews, pop and rock musicians are supposed to have a singular vision of what they’re trying to do and how they’re going about it. Of course we know this largely isn’t true if we read what the people making the music actually say. They talk about collaboration, craft, relationships, and communication between bandmates.

Working hard and getting a little better every day aren’t very sexy though, so I guess the journalists make up the part they want to hear. Or maybe that’s part of writing about a thing as pointless to write about as music: You spend so much time on the surface of things where things are exactly as they appear to be. That’s not much of a story.

In design, the opposite of the singular vision is what you most frequently use to guide what you’re going. We call this Best Practices. It’s a way to say, “We’ve done this before, and it works, so now that we know this, only do it unless you absolutely can’t!”

I read a thing a while ago about the so-called genius of Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple. Apple didn’t ever create anything new, and wasn’t the first to market with anything they’ve ever done. This writer noted they’ve done very well with a lot of things already well-established as a market, however, calling Jobs a “tweaker.” His ability was to see how something was useful and functional to the person using it, and then take that knowledge to build a better version of it. To tweak it.

Later on, this changed a bit I think. Apple these days, as ubiquitous as they are, is innovative in that they’ve made luxury goods out of computers. I wonder if this started when the early Macs and later the neXt computers he helped design had massive cost overruns. Perhaps his insistence that people would pay more for something better allowed him to observe something shrewder, that people would pay for the idea of better as readily as they would for actually functionally better. No one in the Global South has an iPhone unless they have a lot of money to blow, but it’s not because it works better. It’s a status symbol.

I digress. That ability to observe what people really want and need from something, and then to go all out in making a thing that prioritizes those things is a rare one, in writing and design!

Why not though further this idea when we’re talking about pop music? After all, we compare bands to other bands to give you an idea of what they sound like, or feel like (which is not the same thing, by the way, phenomenologically speaking). We post RIYL (Recommended If You Like) and we use terms we know aren’t descriptive to describe entire genres. We mention sub-genres to describe the idea of things when the whole point of sub-genre is about the description of sound.

When we say “black metal” to describe the feeling Jóhann Jóhannsson evokes in a horror movie soundtrack, does it make any sense if it has no blastbeats, no buzzsaw guitars, and no vocals that sound like vomiting? On the other hand, since Radiohead makes music of no discernible genre, but it definitely sounds white, educated, and fussy, it makes absolutely perfect sense to say they’re a rock band. Rock is the basic description you apply to pop music by white people that doesn’t sound like you can dance to it.

So, I’m listening to the new album by Dreamweapon, and I’m getting huge Spacemen 3 vibes. In fact, their Spacemen 3 vibe is so strong I had to go back to some Spacemen to see if I remembered them correctly. I went to the very album that Dreamweapon appears to take their name from.

It’s a live record that’s a single long song that’s essentially a stretched out, noodley amalgam of familiar riffs from their best-known albums, but done with the more accomplished, polished musicianship of their last record, Recurring. This album by the band Dreamweapon sounds as if they have encapsulated that entire progression of another band and then one-upped them.

I think this makes sense. They’ve interpreted something old, and incorporated it as knowledge. In much the way the brain takes any words you say to it and over time figures out the grammar and vocabulary of the language, and also by trying to speak it back, you hone and become expert at the very specific combinations of poses and movements you must move the muscles in your mouth, tongue and throat. In a real sense, you build the knowledge of language into your body.

What Dreamweapon has done is done this with the sound of a record, and a band. They’re a way better Spacemen 3 then the Spacemen 3 ever were, and by a long shot. It sounds like they’re actually trying to do the thing that I always want bands to do, which is to make music that sounds like you’re on drugs when you’re not. They drone, they stretch out, and they hypnotize.

The nod you’re on though isn’t just a pleasant enough sound to listen to when you’re high. There are persistent sounds that fade out so long you can no longer tell whether you’re perceiving what’s in your headphones, or your brain is just interpreting a suggested pattern. The singing, such as it’s recorded anyway, is submerged enough below delay and manipulation that it’s a lot more like a guru or a god is trying to tell you something when your mind is in an altered state.

There are squeaks and rattles and beeps that aren’t in the foreground and may or may not be part of it, I don’t know. The track Gloryhole is a great example of this. Is that rattling electronic distortion? Is it some kind of percussive thing held very close to a mic? Is is some kind of noise or recording error, or…” And I take off one cup of my headphone to see if there’s something happening around me I can’t hear with headphones on. Nope. It’s the record.

That’s not for everyone, but it’s definitely for me. It occurs to me though that I have never read a review that said, “Like Spacemen 3, but better.” Wait, that’s not true. Metal fans say shit like that all the time. People who like genre music don’t want you to have a singular vision. Or they don’t mind, really, as long as it doesn’t get in the way. Genre fans really need you to do a thing in a way that scratches their itch and they go, “Ahhhh, yes, black metal.”

The genius is to capture the thing that they didn’t even know was the most important thing while also nailing the stuff that absolutely has to be there. Dreamweapon are tweakers. Thank fucking goddess.

Stuff mentioned in this review:

Dreamweapon – Rites of Lunacy lp on Bandcamp

Spacemen 3 – Dreamweapon lp on YouTube

Jóhann Jóhannsson – Mandy OST on YouTube