By Bangers

Peel Dream Magazine – Rose Main Reading Room
Topshelf Records

If you’re ever looking to come down from a panic attack, the fourth album from Peel Magazine Dream, Rose Main Reading Room, would be a novel remedy. 

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The bandt’s latest offering is starry-eyed, wistful, and weightless. On the lulling closer “Counting Sheep,” songwriter Joseph Stevens eases us back into a slumber, shooing away intrusive thoughts. “Those days back then / Don’t worry,” he sings softly over leisurely boom-bap drums. “That was pretend / Don’t worry.” Rose Main Reading Room combines Stereolab’s dreamy expansiveness, Sufjan Stevens’ childlike earnestness, and Belle and Sebastian’s pastel playfulness for a project eager to suffuse any waking nightmares.   

At times, Stevens is combatting his own anxieties with time. On “Oblast,” he explores how ignoring past catastrophes only begs for worse occurrences. “Four Leaf Clover” ruminates over past anxiety-inducing versions of himself: “I can’t go back, four leaf clover / I would change a million things about myself, but how?” But the chorus softly bites back: “You know how lucky you are?” Stevens is a tourist of his own memories on Rose Main Reading Room. But the result isn’t always a grinning, rose-tinted recollection of the past; there’s an incredibly subtle tension. 

The bubbling unease and chirpy instrumentation sleepily spar with each other. Although Rose Main Reading Room is mostly a pleasant listen—one I heavily recommend absorbing outside in a park with headphones on to drink up all its nuances—more editing might give these tracks a greater sense of stakes and urgency. Still, in Rose Main Reading Room’s brightest moments, it acts as a gentle rub to extinguish anxiety or as a beautiful reminder to commune with our inner child. 

We’re left with an uneasy graciousness, the sentiment that we should just be lucky to be alive. – GRADE: B- 

Topshelf Records

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