“Dream House” feels like an epic. The entire record is so keenly experimental from back to front. With a haunting opening intro then leading into an equally more magnetic yet bewitchingly entrancing vocal performance on “Follow the Slope Down”, this Manchester experimental alternative rock group constantly seems to be pushing boundaries with their concepts and compositions. There’s a sense of brooding intensity that keeps you mesmerised from the openers alone that then gradually builds and transcends itself into each of the successive pieces. As the almost tribal percussion starts to kick into gear in “Follow the Slope Down”, it feels like you’re in some sort of spiritual experience you can’t let go of.
Combining a keen dream pop aesthetic with powerful psychedelic stylisation, Outside Now bring something wholly new and entirely their own to life with such vivid imagination and resplendent execution. The cinematic vocal harmonies on a song like “I Keep Falling” is nothing short of wholly entrancing, a bewitching performance that leaves you wholly entranced and immersively engaged. Using and cascading between elements of string, electronic, and live percussion all of which seems to be constantly changing, there isn’t a moment of lull or dullness in the arrangements. They’re consistently fresh and innovative, pathbreaking even.
Fundamentally, Outside Now seem to be capturing realities and emotions that pester and beguile us through our struggles with coping in this modern life and capitalist ecosystem we find ourselves inextricably attached to. Loneliness, atomisation, failure, monotony & all the other creeping despair of modern life are front and centre.
This isn’t just an album, it’s an experience that commands attention both aurally and internally. You need to allow yourself to sit back and let the music drive you where it may. It’s grippingly pieced together, with such pointed direction and otherworldly convention and conception.