Detroit art-rock artist Katie Lass goes all out with sounds and textures on her debut album Hypnopomp, throwing out all of the usual "proper" recording tricks and familiar construction bricks of a song out of the window. Combining elements of dream pop, shoegaze, noise and psych rock she has constructed a truly unique collection of songs. Imagine Syd Barrett attending a party thrown by the cast of Alice in Wonderland, with the members Soft Machine and Can pretty near the top of the guest list.
Twinkling keyboards are teaming up with Pixies-alike atonal surf guitar. There is a lot of echo and reverb, and bleeding of the tracks is welcomed an not corrected by Warren Defever of Third Man Mastering who rose to the challenge to keep all the weirdness intact. Carefully sidestepping the pitfalls marked "self-indulgence" and "art-for-art's sake", Lass has made an album that both challenges and invites the listener to go in at the deep end and explore an alternate universe, wherein a sound can have a colour, and a colour can emanate a sound.
