Absolutely Yours' 'Desire Path' Is a Gorgeous Masterpiece of Two-Guitar Dream Pop
The Sonic Breakdown
The Big Takeover’s James Broscheid identified the organizing idea immediately: “Absolutely Yours have built ‘Desire Path’ around a deceptively simple idea: memory rarely resembles the place where it originated.” Ten songs, roughly thirty-one minutes, and a band that understands dream pop is a delivery system rather than a mood board.
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Jacob Lauer on bass and Andy Karel on drums are the record’s quiet engine. On “Rosemary’s Eyes,” Broscheid heard it exactly: the rhythm section “wraps the melody like a warm blanket, while Collins’ vocals and Ritsema & Dan Remes’ instrumentation give the track a classic dream pop feel with sparkling, ethereal guitars and subtle keyboard flourishes.”
The Spatial Dynamics: Cut across two rooms — Soft Cult Studio with engineer Matt Castore, and Collins’ own The Little Princess Recording Studio — then mixed by Neil Weir and mastered by Bruce Templeton. The two-guitar architecture between Collins and Mark Ritsema is the whole design, with Remes’ synth and piano, in andrea cornale’s words for (just another) pop song, “praticamente onnipresenti” — practically omnipresent.
Standout Performance
Bridget Collins, who sings, plays guitar, and engineered half the album in her own studio. cornale puts the voice in the right lineage: “un pezzo delizioso come Are You Listening? parla davvero la stessa lingua di Harriet Wheeler” — a delicious piece like “Are You Listening?” really speaks the same language as Harriet Wheeler.
Why It’s Certified
Because the shimmer is load-bearing. Broscheid on “Margaret,” the lead single: it’s “the album’s most immediately affecting song, a wistful portrait in which shimmering guitar threads seem to blur the distinction between remembered innocence and adult awareness.” And then the sting — “Under that beautiful shine is a more painful reality: becoming an adult doesn’t make the past disappear.” cornale, reviewing a band he calls one of the most talented and least sufficiently recognized in American dream pop, needs four words: “Grande eleganza, esattamente come ci aspettavamo.” Great elegance, exactly as expected. Closer “The Asters” takes its time and earns every one of its four minutes.