Rainy Reveries
A cup of tea that takes forever to cool.
When people say the Mad Hatter «lost it», they forget to mention that the soundproofing went with the roof. And now it pours, endlessly, on the inside. Rainy Reveries is the strange hybrid you weren't expecting: anxious trip-hop with sodden basses, and ethereal wave drifting somewhere between a moaning drone and a lullaby sung by a white rabbit who's late for his own funeral.
The centrepiece — «Mad Hatter» — is where the madness collects to a point. A low, slightly cracked male voice — like someone who's been explaining the rules of a non-existent game too long — recites absurd mantras: «Don't drink when you don't feel like drinking», «Paint the red things blue». It rises from the bottom of a reverb well, occasionally breaking into half-falsetto, frighteningly sober inside the downpour. Beneath it, a beat — sometimes smeared like a boot print in wet clay, sometimes scattering into raindrop glitches.
The rest of the album sustains this drowning atmosphere. Ethereal wave appears here not in gothic guitars but in fugitive, vanishing synth pads that make you close your eyes and feel time stop walking in circles. The vocal (sometimes female, but in the title track distinctly male) repeats fragments of rules and dreams, like a stuck record.
Listening to Rainy Reveries on a sunny day is counter-indicated — the music hisses and ducks back into its well. But at night, under real rain (or at least a rain-noise app), it opens up like a soaked notebook full of ciphers you don't need to decode.
The downside: sometimes the Hatter gets too carried away with his own «madness». A couple of tracks slide into outright abstraction where the rhythm disappears entirely, leaving only static discharge. But devoted Cocteau Twins and early Massive Attack fans will call that a feature.
A note: «drink only warm tea, look out the window, don't check the time.» The Mad Hatter has finally recorded not a tea-party soundtrack but an honest aural depression — and his «Mad Hatter» will become the anthem of everyone who's been sitting too long in that imaginary land.