Review: Ceremony – Tell Me Your Dream
In writing about Ceremony‘s trajectory as a band, it’s hard for me not to see 2010’s Ronhert Park as their crossroads album, an album that represented a fork in the road for their progression as a band, caught between their California hardcore pedigree and their obvious predisposition towards raw post-punk. Specifically, a song like “The Doldrums (Friendly City)” off Ronhert Park was such a canary in the coalmine for the direction of the band. 2012’s Zoo would take the deliberately muted, directionless sound of “The Doldrums”—a song written and performed with such spite, direction and intent—and adapt it to a full-length, all while seemingly misunderstanding much of what made it good to begin with and what made a track like that stand out on a hardcore album.
Zoo was a grand enough record, I guess. I probably liked it more than most. But it absolutely represented the start of an unfortunate trajectory for Ceremony, one that would continue through the increasingly uninteresting The L-Shaped Man and the botched new wave execution of In The Spirit World Now. In spite of it all, I could never give up on Ceremony, partly because of the strength of their first three records, partly because, up until now, even their least interesting records had at least something for me to appreciate.
But unfortunately, all of that is just preamble to me saying Tell Me Your Dreams is easily Ceremony’s worst album to date, and as a fan that’s not an easy thing for me to write.
But man, it’s impossible to overstate just how underwritten this album. Maybe you could always say that about Ceremony, and that perhaps even the peaks of Ronhert Park and Violence Violence prioritized bombastic delivery over songwriting, but with its barren, transparent post-punk sound Tell Me Your Dreams puts its underdeveloped sound front-and-centre.
Opening track “Prograde” is particularly bad: A song that inspires nothing in the listener, just the flattest music imaginable, all transition, no resolution. The most minimal of dub techno; the most mind-numbing of slam; the most regressive of deathcore; all have nothing on the pure musical stasis of this song. It ends at a cowardly but merciful 2:52, achieving nothing but barely establishing its own existence. Its sound represents the bottom rung of contemporary rock music, stacked on the same shelf as the worst of Frank Carter And The Rattlesnakes.
“Other Hells” has some venom in its vocals but it’s just so flat that nothing it does is particularly impactful. In concept, I can imagine that its oscillating siren synths were supposed to inform an alarmed, tense musical tryst between itself and the guitar but instead it reminds me of a modern Bloc Party song, specifically the ones that lean awkwardly towards new rave revivalism.
“Madness” is a respite, with some decent interlocking of drum and bass, although the guitar panning, no doubt trying to replicate the dual-guitar post-punk stylings of their influences, lacks much impact. It’s also a pretty sharp song lyrically, like the bulk of Ceremony’s catalog. “Dark Summer” is breezy and inoffensive, although your mileage may vary with its melodic progression, refusing to resolve in any sort of interesting way.
Listening to “Deep Down Where I Belong,” I can picture a world where it works, where it’s a big highlight on the record. I picture it done by a band like DAF or something, filled with life and pomp and sweat and sex, all drenched in the excess of its own expression. Instead, that synthline is so reedy and weak and useless, and the guitar barely audible, that it’s hard to feel much of anything when I listen to it.
But perhaps that’s the point, y’know. Pairing the anesthetic, anti-septic sound of minimal post punk with a similarly understated expression of the Ceremony sound. But there’s a long history of much more minimal post-punk, bands that stripped things further back than Ceremony ever did while sounding terrific, so I remain unconvinced. It’s all the more tragic because Ceremony remain politically outspoken and conscious in a time where a lot of established punk bands find it easier to maintain a convenient silence. But here it’s a message broadcast over a weak intercom, muddled and degraded by a flat delivery and flatter production.
“Antenna” is maybe the worst song on the album, featuring one of their weakest hooks to date. It’s not that this isn’t Ceremony, it’s not that it’s different, it’s that it’s a sound that’s totally homogenized and dated—this uninspired synth-pop interpolation and these piss-weak The 1975-by-way-of-The Xx instrumentals. It’s such a developmental dead-end that whatever value gleaned from it has to come purely from its delivery and there’s fucking none here, man.
Things do start to look up, though. “Justify” is probably the best track here; its main hook and 1-2 guitar progression creating a swirling, enveloping atmosphere. “Death Destruction Mayhem” is catchy, if a little flat. “10 Planets” has a more ambitious, broad soundscape that it actually uses effectively. And although it doesn’t have the strongest songwriting, “Paradise” evokes melancholy in a way that makes me wish we had gotten an entire album in its tone. The final 4 songs rally to prop up the album before it totally collapses under its own dullness, but it’s too little, too late, and none of the songs are ones I’d compare to the band’s best work.
And tragically, this is somehow Ceremony’s most acclaimed record in over a decade, which is presumably only going to further embolden them to pursue this sound. This furrow of post-punk, this rut that houses a majority of acclaimed contemporary releases from a once-explosive genre, this beige, quiescent, lumpen nothingness that couldn’t rock or roll if its life depended on it. An artistic and aesthetic dead-end. Ceremony aren’t the worst of it, but this is certainly the worst of Ceremony.
1.5/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
Tell Me Your Dreams is out now on Relapse Records.
