MICHAEL BEACH / Dream Violence LP Vinyl
Australian singer/songwriter Michael Beach is an architect of a sound that’s both well-built and ramshackle, straightforward and indeterminably complex, out of the norm yet familiar in all the best ways. On March 19th he returns with an epic fourth album 'Dream Violence' that explores the duality of the human condition. It encapsulates human futility, passion, desire, anger, frustration, and the struggle to maintain hope in a somewhat hopeless time.
Known for his work touring with the eccentric Israeli guitarist Charlie Megira and Australian guitar-jangle-pop band Thigh Master, Beach strives to convey both passion and compassion, energy and action. “My hope is that something gets communicated that makes people think outside of themselves or their surroundings,” he says. “To ask questions, and consider the effects of their decisions. To communicate some essential part of the human spirit that understands intuitively how to feel connected to each other rather than divide, exploit, separate, ignore, and all the other heinous shit we have the ability to do with each other.”
Recorded on two continents, Dream Violence documents Beach’s move from Oakland, California to Melbourne, Australia as he navigated a new music scene, plenty of bureaucratic red tape, and, ultimately, citizenship. Parts of the album were recorded and mixed at Tiny Telephone Recording in Oakland, at the end of a 2019 tour with Kelley Stoltz producing. Other tracks were recorded at Beach’s new home in Melbourne, where he worked with Matthew Ford and Innez Tulloch of Thigh Master, with Peter Warden on drums, to capture an off-the-cuff feel.
Dream Violence unfolds like a revelation, filled with sonic tumbleweeds that reference Neil Young’s On the Beach, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, and the Go Betweens’ Before Hollywood. Influences ranging from the enigmatic outlier Megira to Glenn Branca to the Oblivians are combined to create a new, exhilarating sound, part of the path that Beach has been on since 2008’s Blood Courses. A veteran of year-end indie rock round ups beginning with Golden Theft in 2013 and continuing with Gravity/Repulsion, released in 2017, Beach distills the best of those early albums and adds sharpened intent.
