Remember A Stranger

Singaporean dream pop quintet motifs write songs about memories and coping with loss. Their album artwork and all other associated photos are blurry images in shades of blue, gray, and green, evoking faded photos of childhood visits to the beach, among other nostalgic scenes. The lyrics also detail moments and images from the distant as well as recent past, with "fluorescent" mentioning being driven to the movies as a child, while "valentine" is a plea for an ex-lover to come back, saying how hard it is to get used to living alone in an empty room. The bands music complements these wistful feelings of getting swept away in endless longing. It tips from a gentle blur of gossamer reverb to a heavy shoegaze gale on tracks like the opening instrumental "dawn," then incorporates chiming post-punk hooks on most of the vocal numbers. The singing is generally clear enough to understand without reading the lyrics, but its still hazy enough to work as a textural element and express its sentiments through feeling alone. The second half of the album, while not all that fundamentally different from the first, somehow seems to lean harder on these feelings, producing some of the records most devastating moments. The self-explanatory "lovelost" bases its hook on finding an old picture of someone, triggering a flood of memories and words to say to the person from the past, and the title track describes a moving day scene in which former partners have become ghosts to each other. While it might be possible to simply approach remember a stranger as a pleasant if bittersweet dream pop record, it genuinely does have the power to cause the attentive listener to fall down a rabbit hole of memories and feelings. ~ Paul Simpson