The Sames: You Are The Sames

Dream-pop can be a hard genre to master, with all its molten guitars, clanging beats, and ethereal melodies. Ingredients mixed wrong become unappetizing slop—which may be why so many former dream-pop bands, from Lush and My Bloody Valentine to Lilys and Jack Drag, have either changed their sound, or quit making music altogether. Durham, North Carolina dream-poppers The Sames released a promising EP in 2002, and they didn't rush out a follow-up, presumably because bandleader and producer Zeno Gill was taking precautions not to sully the formula. As it happens, he gets it almost exactly right on the band's full-length debut You Are The Sames, which houses some of the most satisfying shoegazer music in years.

Gill establishes his control about a minute into You Are The Sames, when the anxiously banging guitar of "Heart Pine" hits the chorus and bubbles over instead of exploding. The second song, "In Liberty Lights," sports the melody and lyrics of a dippy hippie romp, but has acid dripping from its sleeves and a heart that keeps skipping beats. "The Light That We've Bent" lays shimmering guitar over a soft martial rhythm, as Gill murmurs about "music machines"; "You Are A Ghost" follows stunted guitar twang and sputtering drums into cobwebs and shadow. The disc peaks with the rushing, crackling "Downtown," which romanticizes streetlights and the way "everybody's right" in the city.

From the thousand soft punches of "There's No Mystery Here" to the somnambulant AM radio-pop of the album-closer "Snake," The Sames take pretty tunes and happy thoughts and refract them through prisms of noise and unexpected rage. You Are The Sames squeezes hard and pats gently all at once, while Gill constructs an atmosphere of collaborative violence and mass hypnosis. This record is all about typing out positive messages on onionskin paper, then setting the pages afire.