Goon’s patchwork brand of indie rock on Dream 3 is instinctual, but never distracted. Recorded in a ramshackle, live tracked process, the LA-based slacker-ish group pieces together lyrical ephemera that compliments their spaced-out, fuzzy sound. It’s a little dreamy insofar as it resembles waking up while hazily recalling oddities that slipped in and out of your consciousness last night, making for a varied record evocative of 4-track cassette recordings and homespun innovation.

In the press material, frontman Kenny Becker notes their central efforts surrounding miniatures and re-arrangement: “When I painted the album art, I wanted to embody the same approach we took to recording. I ended up painting a bunch of smaller still lifes and landscapes, random objects, animals, things that were relevant to the record, and then cut them out and arranged them like stickers on a larger canvas.” The resultant work peers into sonic scenes which follow in the wake of heartbreak (in this case, Becker’s suddenly dissolved marriage), sifting through the sound of bizarro conjunctures, unresolved tension, and daily mundanities alike—the pieces which, after a rapturing event, jostle around for one’s attention, never quite adding up.

Over a cycle of distinct textures, Becker’s androgynous vocals sigh in a gentle, semi-exhausted manner. At times, you get whispers of post-reunion Duster’s celestiality or the lo-fi understatements proffered by Ex Pilots and urika’s bedroom. Even when the ambitions are more recognizable—cue the timely shoegaze bits and Elliot Smith-esque delivery on “Sunsweeping”—the band retains a firm sense of identity.

Take the muted drums and overt fogginess of “Begin Here.” It begins to reach for the stars at a louder midpoint before melting into its subsequent outro, a diffusion which subverts the voluminous nature of soaring space rock. “Closer to” churns through upbeat (if not light) drumming before a groggy comedown, hinted at in its earlier lyrics: “Enter the fog Then the warning comes / Something wrong / Glistening in her jaw / Seraphim are all along and around,” lines which read as grounded and physical yet simultaneously ineffable.

The collage-making ethos is perhaps most evident on “For Cutting The Grass,” a multi-section song which weaves hopeful acoustic plucking between deep-seated guitar grooves. Tracks such as “Fine” likewise proceed from darkness to light like clouds receding, just as wearily enacting the opposite trajectory. Even the seeming sunniness of “Begin Here” is produced from the tension between its outward melodicism and the inner place of anguish from which it originated, according to Becker; across the album, and exemplified by cuts like “Bottle,” the generalizable tone easily doubles for somber depressiveness and acceptive contentment alike.

A fuller picture, as hinted by the cover, is more than the sum of its parts yet always composed through momentary focus on these individual components. The perspectivity of one’s scope is rendered opaque where the details once seemed clear or in order. In its diversions through neo-
psychedelic flourishes, folksy affect, and noise pop infusion, Dream 3’s tracklist is exploratory rather than confused, then, pursuing loose ends or lingering thoughts without expecting neat explication. Remarkably, the consistent front-to-back experience concludes with a sense of completeness—even if it is a shaky one.

Pre-order Dream 3 by Goon HERE