Music Review // Owen Marchildon "Heavy Dreams"

 

The sound of Owen Marchildon should take you right in as it has a familiar rock feel.  At first, it can feel like a band such as Soul Asylum or The Replacements- someone from that MPLS scene.   But then you can hear how this rock is just blissed out and can have that garage feel mixed with that 1950's rock n roll like Buddy Holly.   Further into and you can begin to feel like this song should be part of the Empire Records soundtrack.

I've always been fascinated by dreams because some people don't dream and others have dreams where they can conjure up places and people which don't exist in real life.   The title of this song comes out in the lines: "Heavy Dreams dangling towards heavy sunlight" which feels like both the sleep and waking up is important.   But after that, there is the line "I'm no longer alone" and later on the line "You're walking down the aisle" which makes me feel like this is a song about being married.

In a large sense, and ignoring the lines about walking down the aisle, this is a love song and if you're in love with someone you can relate with it based on that.   But isn't it funny how so many love songs just take it as far as love and then stop there?  Not many love songs take it to be about marriage and a lot of the times when a song is about being married it's overly obvious.   This can alienate people who aren't married, so I feel like this does a good job of including everyone in love.

Whether it's for those sweet guitar chords or the words which come with them, Owen Marchildon has this way of combining music from the past- the 1950's- with music from the more recent past- the 1990's- to give us this almost That Thing You Do sound but just something that is the best of both worlds.