Walking With Memoryhouse

The Canadian duo Memoryhouse released their first full-length album today, The Slideshow Effect, on Sub Pop. The band seems to fall in the "dream pop" genre, which I admit to not being overly familiar with. The music is generally soft, unobtrusive, and ambient, but for some reason I'm really enjoying this album and could see myself returning to it over and over. Sometimes you just need something to put on and zone out to, and this seems to be a really good album for doing just that. That's not to say that the music is boring or uninteresting. It really isn't, and the more I listen to it the more I pick up on little elements going on here and there. It's just that it can lend itself well to either attentive or inattentive listening.

The song that really hooked me was "Walk With Me," which I first heard a couple months ago (and which can be downloaded for free on Amazon and streamed below). Repeated listens to "Walk With Me" led to me eagerly anticipating the album's release today. Again, I can't really articulate what sets this song apart from other dream pop songs that I've heard and subsequently forgotten, but for whatever reason I found myself coming back to it repeatedly. The song starts out with an organ type sound and a sort of quiet hypnotic beat in the background before slowly adding some sort of bells and then vocals. It takes about two minutes before picking up a bit, but the build up makes the eventual refrain all the more enjoyable. Before you can get too comfortable with the refrain, there is a quieter interlude. The song closes with another couple trips through the refrain, which repeats until the end but resists becoming stale or redundant by adding various vocal or instrumental elements on subsequent passes. If you want to stream the song before downloading it above, here you go:



While I wanted to highlight my favorite track from the album (and one of my favorites of 2012 so far), you can listen to the whole album via Spin or below for free. Since it just came out today, I've only been able to listen to it all the way through once, but I anticipate going back several times in the next week or two.