REVIEW · Songs & Albums
Big Deal’s “Dream Machines”: A Small Dream Finds a Band-Sized Space
Mute identifies a recurring dream as the origin of “Dream Machines”. The title’s dream consequently becomes more specific than a general hope for the future. Something remembered after waking and returning again provides the starting point. An image repeating inside one person’s head becomes a song that can be handed to somebody else.
Big Deal - Dream Machines
The Familiarity of a Returning Dream
A recurring dream combines familiarity with a lack of control. Recognising the same scene differs from deciding that it should return. This origin lends the word “machines” an unusual resonance. A dream returning without conscious activation can suggest a device that starts moving before its owner does.
Within that interpretation, the pleasure of returning somewhere familiar approaches the discomfort of being unable to leave. Placing a private experience beside an impersonal object gives the title its tension. It suggests something happening within a person without being entirely available to that person’s control.
A Wider Space for Music Made by Two
On June Gloom, Kacey Underwood and Alice Costelloe expanded their configuration to include drums and bass. Its fourth track, “Dream Machines”, occupies that changed setting. Additional instruments create space to give intimate feelings other sources of weight and movement.
An expanded configuration and an intensely personal dream may appear to point in different directions, yet they coexist here. An image originating with one person passes through the work of two and becomes a larger recording. Within the album’s development, Big Deal can be understood as enlarging both their sound and the space available for small feelings.