Goon
Dream 3
BORN LOSERS
Experimentation and vulnerability reflected from LA indie-psych quartet Goon’s 2022 sophomore album Hour of Green Evening like sunlight on gleaming ocean water. Whether it was the melancholic vocals, the contrastingly dreamy melodies, or Kenny Becker’s narratives of loneliness, Goon quickly gained appeal for their muted, homemade garage-rock sound and heartbreaking songwriting. On their third full-length, the brighter-eyed and harder-hearted Dream 3, they transform lively rock textures into colorful psychedelic environments, making Boards of Canada’s mysticism look temperamental and Dinosaur Jr.’s megalomania seem phony by comparison. Working with Claire Morison at Wild Horizon Studios, playful darkness seeps out of Becker’s world into these 13 tracks of full-bodied psychedelic shoegaze, which settle deeply into their creator’s cataclysmic transitional life period.
While 2024’s folk-tinged “Death Spells” didn’t make it onto the LP despite its similar surrealist nature, this record still holds that exhausted, burnt feeling of spending too much time in the sun. “Sunsweeping” captures a lens flare of bright chord progressions and Andy Polito’s percussive silhouette like a bird flying over a trailhead. On the front half of the album, “For Cutting the Grass” faintly emerges with Pinback-esque guitar to ease the transition into the more mellow “Apple Patch” after the full-on screamo climaxes of “Patsy’s Twin.” Conceptual and elusive, Becker writes with hallucinatory imagery, in so doing propelling a visceral feeling of profound freedom, daunting loss, and sensory strangeness all at once.
Written during what Becker cites as the most devastating period of his life, Dream 3 is a partial product of a fallen reality that’s in turns transgressive and sedating. Inspired by the sounds of Pixies and Bibio, the experimental anthology of quasi-rock anthems receives its lyrically morose tension from Becker’s interior chaos. While underwater, the stories that surfaced from Becker’s flooded life shaped a deep reflection wrought with a colorful release not unfamiliar to the musician’s painting style. As the illustrator for the band’s album art, Becker took inspiration from the album’s layered approach and arranged nine individual still life and landscape paintings into a single conclusive piece that feels as decisive as the sounds it encapsulates. Much like the art, at the heart of this record is Becker arranging himself into one collection of 13 transcendental tracks full of melancholy and wonder.
Dream 3 seems to bring all of Becker’s personal turbulence—as well as that of his band—to rest, as the record settles in as their most thorough, grounded project since their conception. Still possessing a homemade feel to it, and as sludgy as ever, the LP is a saturated image of emotional affectation, heavy and unique sound design, and deeply sad songwriting that should appeal to fans of Elliott Smith, Radiohead, and Nirvana.
