Label: Slowplay
Released: 22nd April 2021
Romanticising your life is all about the attitude and mindset, apparently. Or so TikTok tells us. Yet, the right soundtrack is definitely required too. Look no further – Dreamer Boy has delivered just that. If you’re looking to romanticise every slightly pink sunset or drive to get an iced coffee, ‘All The Ways We Are Together’ is primed to make you feel unshakeably like the main character.
The Nashville based musician, otherwise known as Zach Taylor, outlines a narrative on his second album – across sixteen tracks, it takes you directly through the experience of falling head over heels with a friend. Through twinkling, breezy guitar lines and silky falsettos, Dreamer Boy weaves a tale of romance so sweet it might just rot your teeth (in the best way possible, of course).
At times, the album takes a leaf out of John Mayer’s books in a series of delicious, electrifying guitar lines on tracks like ‘Crybaby’ and ‘Let’s Hole Hands’. He constantly manages to shake things up, however: ‘Lightspeed’ is a gorgeous endeavour into a world of lush synth.
There’s a recurring sense of the album existing solely in the clouds: it paints a vivid, pastel-tinged soundscape that is dizzyingly sky high. It is achingly tender and earnest; ‘August’, in all its slow jam glory, acts as the culmination of that heady enchantment with someone else. The vocals are at their most effortless, and combined with layers of ethereal harmony, it’s enough to make you fall deeply in love as you listen.
Scattered with all the trademarks of your favourite coming-of-age films from slow dances to swimming pools, ‘All The Ways We Are Together’ embraces love in its most natural, authentic form, and it is completely uplifting for it. As the final track, ‘All Or Nothing’ fades to isolated, hazy vocals, its story wraps up, leaving you to get lost in your own daydreams in the quiet that remains.
