Statistics - Leave Your Name
Reviewed by ryan
Don't let the associations to Conor Oberst and his time with agit-rock band Desaparecidos fool you: Denver Dalley mines a different muse altogether. While Dalley might handle the guitar duties in Oberst's rock-minded group, his solo ventures under the name Statistics amass layers of light feedback with pop hooks and sticky synths. Leave Your Name, his debut full-length, attempts to resurrect shoegaze's freeform atmospheres, hints of melancholy, and pop rock configurations, but simply doesn?t find enough room in these 11 songs to adequately portray his vision. There's something inherently different in the approach that makes Dalley not even remotely able to approximate My Bloody Valentine's beautiful rushes of noise or Slowdive's delicate dreampop soundscapes. With Statistics, he attempts to make shoegaze atmospherics conform to typical pop structures whereas the true greats of this genre skewed pop dynamics and made the traditional, structural archetypes fit into their gauzy layers of noise and feedback symphonies; not the other way around. However, Leave Your Name does exhibit potential, but that means nothing unless Dalley can fully realize it in the future. [www.jadetree.com]