With her fourth studio album, Dreamstate, Kelly Lee Owens seeks to reconcile her tendencies toward the ethereal with the melodic prowess that defined 2017’s Kelly Lee Owens and 2020’s Inner Song. The album is an exploration of the blurry boundaries between the real and the imaginary, but the inherent risk in inviting listeners to dream is the chance that they may instead find themselves dozing off.
While Dreamstate is sonically cohesive, the album often feels like a compromise between the propulsive and the sedate. The opening track, “Dark Angel,” pairs Owens’s lush, reverb-soaked vocals with a euphoric synth hook, but as the song segues into the even more downbeat title track, the album’s longest track at five-and-a-half minutes, that early momentum begins to lag. Repetition is a key component of electronic music, but there’s little payoff here.
Conversely, repetition is an asset on “Love You Got,” which is anchored by its earworm of a vocal and massive synth stabs. Elsewhere, “Time To” is based around simple words of wisdom, repeated over glitchy synth lines and breakbeats. “Thankful for what I didn’t get, now I want a meaning instead,” Owens sings. While on their own, these lyrics border dangerously close to cliché, the music itself is hypnotic, elevating the song’s otherwise trite sentiments.
With its soft, spacey pads, strings, and simple oscillating synths, “Ballad (In the End),” which was co-written with the Chemical Brothers, provides a natural palette for Owen’s longing for “something bigger than me.” Yet her search ultimately feels unfulfilled, as Dreamstate never fully arrives at the big, life-affirming moment of discovery it clearly aims for. The clubby “Sunshine” and “Air” feel small and earthbound in comparison to the loftier ambitions that Owens strives for on tracks like “Ballad (In the End)” and “Rise.”
An album trapped in limbo between the worlds of the waking and dreaming, between moments of transcendence and somnolence, Dreamstate feels alternately vivid and vaguely sketched. The album excels when it delivers a definitive narrative arc, either through music that resonates with the body or lyrics that speak to the soul. Unfortunately, not every song reaches these heights, but those that do emerge from their slumber to briefly glimpse the sublime.
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