Always

REVIEW: .michael. - Blustery Dreams Of Me Rendered Smiley Seeing You, Always

Laura Kerry

Our minds are good at filling in and creating meaning from what’s around us. Animation, for example, uses distinct frames with changing images that form fluid movements when we view them fast enough. Similarly, humans see animals in clouds and faces in food. Given the right stimuli, we make complete, vibrant pictures and stories.

In Blustery Dreams Of Me Rendered Smiley Seeing You, Always, .michael. makes a whole world from a clarinet and a guitar. A collaboration of Brooklyn musicians Winter Sorbeck and Michael Sachs—who on their Bandcamp page refer to themselves cryptically as Michael and Michael—the duo expands themes that they introduced in their 2015 debut, Home Is Where You Hang Your Heart Is. Perhaps it’s these kinds of evocative titles, or the handmade puppets on the cover of the new LP that recall Where the Wild Things Are, but .michael. begins to establish the dreamy, childlike magic of their music before the first notes play.

When they do play, those notes don’t disappoint. Blustery Dreams opens on “Never Come Back,” one of about half the songs on the album that include singing. In it, the vocals are delicate and unaffected, resembling the tender innocence of Sufjan Stevens as acoustic guitar and clarinet trade between melody and rhythm behind them. “I want to have a breezy outlook, drink lemonade / Climb that foggy mountain, plow right through those branches / Hold your hand,” they sing, ending the song on a sweet note after introducing an earlier lost love.

When .michael. includes vocals, the lyrics are often heavier than their sound suggests. “I’m really sorry that I made you fearful to the point of almost ruining my life,” they sing on “Tall in a Straight Line,” and “I’ve had a heartbreak for a while and I won’t be coming back for a while to this town,” in “Heartbreak.” From quiet combinations of voice and two instruments, .michael. weaves intricate folk and baroque-infused tales of sadness and glimmers of hope.

Even when they have no voices to carry the stories, .michael. paints vivid pictures. In songs such as “Tumbleweed of the Soul” and “Put Put,” the guitar and clarinet replace vocals, flitting around conversationally. With only two tools at their disposal, Sacks and Sorbeck cover a large swath of dynamic territory, sometimes squawking in anguish, flitting around nervously, or flowing romantically. In these moments, the listener hears an entire classical symphony in the spaces between the two instruments. The artists emphasize that leap with the only cover on the album, “One of Five,” which reimagines the first of Stravinsky’s series of piano duets, “Five Easy Pieces.”

Between folk songs and neoclassic covers, .michael. creates something that’s entirely their own. And throughout Blustery Dreams, they remind us of that with songs that are addressed to themselves—“Sorry Michael,” “Michael Doesn’t Remember,” and “Namaste, Mike.” Sometimes, the album feels like stepping into someone else’s dream, an intimate and disorienting exercise that leaves us with only hints and fragments of the whole. As is the natural progression of disparate parts, though, the dream eventually takes beautiful and cohesive shape.