The Dream Syndicate | The Days Of Wine And Roses | (Ruby) 1982

“The Days Of Wine And Roses” (Ruby JRR 807) 1982

The Dream Syndicate | The Days Of Wine And Roses | (Ruby) 1982 | EVERYONE SAYS the singer’s voice sounds a lot like Lou Reed’s and that the band sounds like some kind of LA tribute to The Velvet Underground. And yes, it’s true that Steve Wynn does vocalise a lot like old Uncle Lou in many places — he’s the guy who’s finally going to take the critical heat off Human Switchboard’s Bob Pfeiffer in that regard.

But the impression of impersonation is superficial and passes the moment one recognises the compelling content of these songs. For this is a record full of alternative interpretations, a record in which a lot of things aren’t as they appear at first. It’s a record that certainly possesses its own voice, a record that seems dark at first but then lights up to reveal unique and savage beauties.

This is a pop face that is not made-up, and not pretty, but it is wonderful to contemplate. We don’t believe in gestures that are merely learned. We take them as an academic exercise, not a personal Voice, and we dismiss them.

Dream Syndicate take learned gestures, time-tested signs of emotional involvement, and invest them with the power of personal (re)discovery. So they sound like this and that, so they recapture the vitality of one of the best pop sounds ever. They don’t recycle, they aren’t just indulging themselves. One feels they are driven towards those classic signs and forms by personal need that could not be denied.

It keeps them honest and keeps us entertained, involved, moved and troubled rather than just amused or lightly tickled. This is a hard sounding record that can be inspiring or disturbing but it is not likely to be taken lightly.

The Dream Syndicate | The Days Of Wine And Roses | (Ruby) 1982

And another thing about Wynn’s voice. It makes you imagine a face to go with it, an expressive face on which could register the various emotions contained here. This stuff is anything but anonymous.

These are songs mostly of life and love gone wrong. They are sometimes hurt, sometimes hopeful, sometimes cleverly cynical and ironic, sometimes precariously vulnerable.

There are angry words that ricochet like wild bullets around guitar noises that are brutal and harsh as unpleasant truths. Combine descriptions (musical and verbal) of near psychosis and tragedy that resolve into choruses of unexpected delicacy.

There are narratives that snarl and hiss at every veneer of normality, and there are narratives that tenderly, wistfully long after a kind of normality or stability of emotions that the singer seems to know is not his lot in life. Hard guitars, hard feelings, hard to ignore. (NME, 18/12/82)