After three years of recording and months of advance singles, shoegaze supergroup Loveblind released their full-length debut, ‘Sleeping Visions,’ via Saint Marie Records. Listen via Spotify below.
Pulling members of Crash City Saints, Whimsical, and Seasurfer, Loveblind started cobbling ‘Sleeping Visions’ together in 2017 from their respective home studios across the US and Europe. The result is a fittingly sprawling 10-song set of shoegaze, dream pop, industrial, and metal, as evidenced by the dichotomy in previous singles War Planets, Goodbyes Without Goodbye and Daydream.
“The vision of the band from the beginning was to take all of our musical influences and mesh them together to create something new and unique,” guitarist Wyatt Parkins told The Big Takeover in a recent interview. “I believe that vision was accomplished as much as reasonably possible.”
While “international synthwave supergroup” is enough of a descriptor to turn some heads, Loveblind are all the more impressive for making music since 2017 without ever having been in the same room.
Spearheaded by Saint Marie Records owner Wyatt Parkins, the Texas-based label head initially joined forces with Joshua Garman of Florida’s Crash City Saints. The duo soon tapped Germany-based vocalist and songwriter Dorian Electrique of Seasurfer fame for her strikingly icy vocals, followed closely by fellow Seasurfer member Mikel Wegener on bass. Rounding things out, Neil Burkdoll of Florida’s Whimsical came aboard on guitar.
After years of incremental recording, file transfers, phone calls, video chats and constant Facebook chats, their upcoming debut album, ‘Sleeping Visions,’ will be unveiled in March 2020 via Saint Marie.
Opening on the abrasively industrial War Planets, Loveblind aim and succeed in creating an album completely alien up against their previous bands. Where single Daydream fully lives up to its title in soaring dream pop, White Piano Black Dress (featuring Ringo Deathstarr’s Elliott Frazier) isn’t afraid to switch gears and careen towards earth with massive, shoegazing guitar work and chirpy synth percussion.
With Electrique’s vocals kept front and centre guiding ‘Sleeping Visions,’ its ten songs aim to interpret dreams with as much lucidity as our waking states, but Visions is far from a half-awake listen. If anything, Loveblind’s debut introduces a band that not only takes its members’ past pedigrees and distance as a challenge, but a superpower.
‘Sleeping Visions‘ track list
1. War Planets
2. Sleeping Visions
3. Daydream
4. Goodbyes Without Goodbye
5. Mistress
6. Ice Song
7. White Piano Black Dress
8. Saturnine
9. A Strange Place
10. We Land
‘Sleeping Visions‘ is out now on vinyl, CD, and digital platforms via Saint Marie Records.
