Album Review: Joachim Cooder, ‘Dreamer’s Motel’
Multi-instrumentalist Joachim Cooder, who has played with artists from Johnny Cash and Ali Farka Touré to Dr. John and Mavis Staples, follows up his 2020 album Over That Road I’m Bound with the dreamy sonic landscapes of Dreamer’s Motel.
Cooder coaxes plinking notes from his Array Mbira, a piano-like instrument that produces ringing, bell-like sounds, and notes from his father Ry Cooder’s swirling guitars circle upward on the title track, which opens the album. Vocal choruses spiral concentrically, floating on the song’s shimmering musical waves. On this song, Cooder conducts listeners on a wistful journey through the corridors of his waking reveries, transporting them through the mists of time to days of lingering sweetness and promise.
Tom Petty-esque vocals and Caribbean rhythms shuffle around each other in the gently percolating “Sight and Sound,” while ringing guitars provide the foundation of the lilting echoes of the choruses on the tender lullaby-like “Cool Little Lion.” On the gospel-inflected “Let Me See My Brother Walk,” ethereal choral vocals call and respond to Cooder’s lead vocal; the instrumental beauty of the song grows out of banjo notes weaving around and under the foundations of piano, viola, and violin. The album closes with “Down to the Blood,” on which jangling psychedelic folk meets Dr. John’s voodoo Cajun stylings.
Dreamer’s Motel transports listeners into a boundless sonic stratosphere in which reality is imbued with the visions of hope that live in dreams and memories.
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More information about Dreamer’s Motel is available HERE
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