Fever Dreams Pts 1 - 4
What comes next for Johnny Marr? The celebrated English musician is one of the best-known guitar players in modern history, from The Smiths to contemporary work with Hans Zimmer and even Modest Mouse. On his fourth solo album and first in four years, Marr threads the needle through his exhaustive exploration of genre. “Spirit Power and Soul” is soulful electro in the vein of The Cure—night and day from the spacey spoken-word interlude “Rubicon,” or the album’s frequent psychedelic detouring (Primal Scream’s Simone Marie plays bass on three of its tracks). His idiosyncratic, Smiths-ian riffs—those signature lead-rhythm guitar tones—abound (“Night and Day,” “God’s Gift,” the rollicking “Tenement Time,” which divides the first half of the double LP from the second.) Moody, expansive, filtered through a deep understanding of guitar-pop melody, the project asks its listeners to have an open and patient mind.
This sprawling and ambitous 16-track album is the sound of a focus-focused artist who is immersed in innovation
Moments of greatness are plentiful, but ‘Fever Dreams…’ shines brightest when Marr lets his guitar do the talking.
Marr applies his scattershot sonics to matters of the pandemic era, while pop-punk queen Avril Lavigne offers a heady dose of nostalgia
Johnny Marr designed Fever Dreams as a series of four interlocked EPs, but after delivering the second part of the project in late 2021, the next two installments arrived latched to the previous two as the double-album Fever Dreams, Pts.
Marr trades post-punk guitar for energetic electro-indie in a hopeful, pandemic-processing 16-track opus
Faith in rock's alchemising power spread thin but true on a riff-heavy double-album