Week in Pop: Dreamend, Joe Gorgeous, lojii

Post Author: Sjimon Gompers

Echo Bloom

Beyond the echoes with Echo Bloom; photographed by Bettie Hu.

Brooklyn based band Echo Bloom have been releasing color palette motifs on releases from Blue, Blue Shift, Red, Red Shift & today provided some exclusive perspectives on the making of their latest album Green. Offering more song cycles of globe-spinning experiences; Kyle Evans, Aviva Jaye, Cody Rahn, Alex Minier & friends continuing the narrative of the ever-blossoming resonances witnessed throughout the evolving echo chambers of the world.
The band brings ballads for our contemporary times with radio ready anthems like the endearing “Song for Steven”, to fantasias of film heroes that salutes the vintage styles of stage & screen with the piano progressions that make up of “Cecil DeMille”. Echo Bloom accentuates the adhesive components of amorous attachments on the spellbound single “Love & Superglue” where the chords ring with a certain sort of sincerity, right before you are treated to the romantic paean to the glowing accelerant energy of love on the pyrotechnic barn-burner “Fire in Your Eyes”.
Emotions move like shooting stars on the space-sent single “Comet”, delivering big power-pop fare on “The Duke” (a variation of “Sparky’s Dream” by Teenage Fanclub), to the reflective Americana balladry on “Grand Marquis”. Honest & emotive tinged pop arrangements are everywhere on Green as felt on fist-clenched tributes like “Anthony”, to delivering grandiose anthems like “Mary”, to jogging the charged senses of memory on “The English Teacher”. Triathalon-like focuses are depicted on “The Swimmer” as “Unchanged” exudes a song that seeks something static, familiar & permanent amid the constantly shifting sand structures of life & time.


Echo Bloom’s Kyle Evans shared an exclusive foreword on the making of the album Green & what the album means to them:

I was shopping the first record in our Colors trilogy Blue around for reviews a few years ago, and got some really biting feedback from one of the people I was working with. We weren’t getting a lot of traction on press, booking, or really much of anything, so I asked the person for their opinion about why nothing was clicking. Their reply was honest, and pretty biting—it basically came down to You know, music isn’t for everybody, and I’m not sure you’re ever really going to be good enough for people to pay attention. I walked around the city that afternoon thinking about it, and trying to wrap my head about what it really meant.
I’d recently heard this Bukowski quote Find what you love, and let it kill you…for all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover. That was where I was at. It would be much easier in life if the thing I loved, the thing that brought me such a unique sense of challenge and happiness, was tax preparation or dentistry or investment banking. But it wasn’t—I knew exactly what it was—it was the same thing it had always been. And I was going to work at it until I got there. So I wrote the song on Green called “The Swimmer” that takes that sentiment and puts it in the mind of a long distance swimmer trying to swim across some gigantic lake. After swimming for hours the sun has descended, and he doesn’t know how far he is from the next shore. But he keeps going, because he was made for it. Because he loved to swim and loved the feel of the water on his body.
That’s what Green is for me.

Echo bloom’s new album Green is available now via Spotify & everywhere.