Song of the day

“Kendra’s Dream”, by The Dream Syndicate.

 

Of all of the many things I never imagined I would find myself doing in 2017, very close to the top of the list would have been listening to a new Dream Syndicate song featuring vocals by Kendra Smith.

And yet here we are. 

People seem to put their first album, "Days of Wine and Roses", on a pedestal. I'm certainly not going to argue with that, but speaking only for myself, the second side of their follow-up album, "Medicine Show", gave me a way out of the three-minutes-good, two-minutes-better mindset of much of what I was listening to back then. I had had the good fortune of being able to pick up 2JJ of an evening, floating in and out of the AM airwaves depending on the weather conditions. A couple of the night-time DJs there had tastes that straddled pre- and post-punk, so in many ways I had the best of both worlds. I was obsessed with Television's "Marquee Moon", without  having the good fortune to find out what it was until many years later. So the long tracks at the end of "Medicine Show", like side two of the second Roxy Music album, filled an important vacuum, while also, I can now see, teaching me what I needed to know in order to better appreciate the music, primarily from the States, of the present moment: your Ryley Walkers, Chris Forsyths and so on. Curiously then (and disappointingly), "Medicine Show" seems to be the one Dream Syndicate record that isn't presently available. 

Kendra Smith, meanwhile, walked away from the Dream Syndicate after "Days of Wine and Roses", teamed up with Dave Roback under the name Opal to put out the most underrated, and possibly, with the passage of time, the most important, album on the SST label, made a couple of frequently astounding solo records, and then, apparently, went back to the land, leaving music behind. Until now.

2017 has been a thoroughly bizarre year in so many ways, not many of them positive. But then you get something like this. It may be my imagination, but the music here, and in other places on this album, also seems to slot very nicely into the same groove that I'm picking up on the new Slowdive album, with maybe a bit of MBV rolled in. Or perhaps that's just me.