FROMME #1 — Album Review
FROMME #1 — Album Review
FROMME #1
Nothing announces a new artist onto the scene better than an intriguing backstory. England’s FROMME — aka multi-instrumentalist Darrell Carter — claims that his moniker and the music from his debut album FROMME #1 came to him in a dream after a night in a small-town English pub and an encounter with a “fabled devil’s painting hidden in an upstairs room.” The mysterious origin story has yielded a heady, swirling dreamscape of an album that takes many of the more traditional psychedelic tropes and freshens them up for the modern age. Though many songs on it are very melodic and capable of being enjoyed on their own merits, this is definitely a work to be taken in as a whole — much like a night of lucid dreaming.
The opening single and album opener “How Does It Feel?” kicks things off with a pulsating bass line and a swirling, ascending-and-descending guitar figure. They mesh together with ambient white noise to create the sensation of being showered in the warm morning rays of psychedelic sunshine, making the song’s title something of a rhetorical question. The track fades out with FROMME’s phased voice monastically chanting “(a)s the echoes decay, on a perfect day.”
“We Are Alone” continues in this vein with a grooving bass line, warped vocals, and atmospheric background noise, while “Ponders End” replaces those textures with a catchy piano riff and a feedback/noise middle section that would make Lou Reed proud.
FROMME also shows he can get gritty with the filthy guitar work in “2AM,” which includes the mystifying lyric: “It’s two in the morning when she comes… She knows.” “I See It All” begins with a droning, feedback-drenched introduction that morphs into something resembling the Chemical Brothers meets the Stone Roses.
Carter’s toolbox of hallucinatory sounds is vast: the haunting harmonies of “Until We Meet Again”; the otherworldly reverberations of “Your Eyes Are Alive,” which feels like it’s being broadcast from another universe before the typewriter-like hi-hat closes the track with the plea, “Take what you need, leave what you know.”
Though the Mick Jagger “2000 Light Years from Home”-era vocal effects sometimes obscure the lyrics and a few of the sonic choices come straight from the psychedelic playbook, FROMME manages the feat of making these ideas sound fresh even to experienced ears. The result is a very promising debut from an artist worth keeping an eye on. Hopefully, FROMME keeps dreaming up lush sounds after long nights at the pub for years to come.
– Brian Cooper
FROMME #1 is available as a digital download on these platforms:
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