Jai Agnish • Awake When You Dream

Jai Agnish
Awake When You Dream
self-released (free download)

Among the small circle of listeners familiar with his work, Jai Agnish is perhaps best known for his electro-pop albums Automata (2000) and Mechanical Sunshine (2006). Awake When You Dream, his third full-length, is an attempt "to see what he could pull off without the machines," leaving Agnish with just barebones instrumentation: a Gibson acoustic, a Roland synth, and the occasional backing vocal by Peg Carlin.

But the music doesn't suffer from this back-to-basics approach; in fact, Awake When You Dream is quite an appealing, tuneful little disc, with just enough diversity—"New Parade" and its pattern of march and glide, "Walls" and its urgent succession of descents—to keep what are quite homogenous songs from getting stale over a 42-minute running time. The album's stumbling point is instead its reliance on repetition, which, coupled with Agnish's odd and not particularly flexible vocal delivery, makes these thin songs seem less substantial.

Repetition can be used to grand effect, and many a singer (Morrissey and Isaac Brock come immediately to mind) has built a career on it, but Agnish's lyrical repetition often feels gratuitous or lazy, as in "Paradise":

Trying to find my way to paradise
To paradise
Trying to find my way to paradise
To paradise

Can't quite figure out this roadmap
And there's too many signs
Too many signs
Can I hitch a ride there with you?
Can I hitch a ride there with you?

Trying so hard
Does it matter at all?
Matter at all?
Trying so hard
Does it matter at all?
Matter at all?

Tie up to the truck
Maybe you can tow me there
You can tow me there

This transcription, abbreviated slightly for the sake of space, doesn't quite capture how often certain stanzas are revisited several times within this sequence, and that the whole sequence is then repeated a second and third time. Had there been something profound or poetic in all these lines it might have been an easy thing to overlook, but "Paradise" is just one of the many songs on Awake When You Dream that takes a long time to say nothing in particular in a very solemn way. "Walls" is guilty of it too:

Concrete walls above my head
Didn't mean it in the end
Didn't mean it at all

Walls above my head (x3)
And in the end (x3)
I guess it's best for the rest of us (x2)

How high is this anyhow? (x2)

Tracks like "Lightning Bugs," "Shopping Malls," "An American," and "Farview" are of a slightly different, vignette-as-narrative variety, and while they do offer something meatier than tepid philosophizing, Agnish sings them in a bemused, distanced way that renders their content flat. Although this doesn't scuttle the songs entirely, it's still tempting to imagine how, say, Sufjan Stevens (who's worked with Agnish from time to time) or Damien Jurado might handle this very same material and imbue it with the bit of heart and conviction that it's wanting.

Awake When You Dream still has quite a bit going for it—not least that it's decent music that Agnish has made available at no cost to you—and some, though not all, of its shortcomings tend to recede after repeated listens. It's not an album for the ages, but it ought to leave you with a couple of melodies that will be hard to shake for the next few weeks.

Listen and download: Bandcamp, Last.fm, Virb