Love Is a Stream

As a member of San Francisco legends Tarentel and Type's premier astral travelers The Alps, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is hardly a new addition to the label, so it's hard to believe that Love Is a Stream is his first Type solo album. With previous releases on Arbor, Spekk and his own Root Strata imprint, this latest album marks his journey into the beautifully cacophonous world of dream pop. Shoegaze music has been much maligned in recent years, probably due to its rebirth and subsequent explosion of popularity (which gave rise to hundreds of young bands aping the over twenty-year-old sound); however it was only a fragment of the genre that these bands attempted to recreate. On Love Is a Stream, instead of focusing on tired, melancholy ballads, Cantu-Ledesma focuses solely on expansive, almost noise-ridden hopefulness. This is the kind of noise audiences fell in love with when My Bloody Valentine blew their ear drums performing Loveless, or the kind of harmonic excess heard on Catherine Wheel's Ferment, but taken into deeper, more abstract realms. Love Is a Stream is dedicated to love itself, and the dreamy, shimmering blown-out textures might at first sound like white noise before they ultimately give way to blissful harmony and hidden melody. Underneath the grit and growl are hidden guitar parts, synthesizer drones and even vocals (provided by Lisa McGee, John Twells and Maxwell August Croy) that succeed in swelling the dense, tape-saturated songs to heady new heights and belie any influences they might have. On each listen the mind strips away another layer of dust and bones to reveal haunting and deeply moving beauty. The world might be spiraling into despair, but Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has brought us a record that isn't afraid to share the love.