Peel Dream Magazine HHV Records 7 Items

oe Stevens' Peel Dream Magazine project has been turning heads and catching ears since late 2017. Stevens is a brilliant writer and arranger and something of a pop scholar; steeped in the history of everything from 60s sunshine pop to 70s kosmische groove to 90s shoegaze and beyond, every Peel Dream album explores new territory and illuminates new corners of Stevens’ roving interest.

The story began with Peel Dream Magazine's debut album Modern Meta Physic, which was released in Fall 2028 and immediately garnered intense interest from music heads attuned to the sounds of artists like Broadcast, Neu!, Steve Reich & Grouper. 2020 brought Agitprop Alterna and its companion EP Moral Panics, records that assimilated shoegaze textures, but put them in service of sharp tunes and a Stereolab-like attention to space age detail. Most recently the band has struck out in new directions with Pad - an album that looks back affectionately at 60s baroque pop, full of sunshine, swing and sophistication.

After some time spent out-of-print thanks to ongoing vinyl production delays, we’re very happy to bring you this fresh new pressing of Modern Meta Physic, this time on beautiful yellow & black splatter vinyl. With the recent release of Pad it’s a perfect time to reassess this terrific record and restock the Peel Dream catalog.

Rose Main Reading Room, the fourth full length by Peel Dream Magazine, is a lush, inviting headphones record; the kind of album made to accompany city bus rides and rainy-day solo trips to accidental destinations. The band, whose name nods to the BBC Radio 1 legend John Peel — arbiter of all things underground, quality, and (it must be said) "cool" — has since its inception been a genre-hopping experiment, jumping from motorik krautrock to shoegaze and space age pop, and their newest work is a perfect starting point for the uninitiated, beckoning toward a newfound romance and nostalgia with their catchiest collection of songs to date. Across its fifteen songs, Rose Main Reading Room ultimately proposes a world of marvels and compelling complexity: “Oblast” cheekily prods at mutually assured destruction; “Ocean Life” explores the infiniteness within ourselves; while “R.I.P. (Running in Place)” unpacks an all too familiar stagnation. It’s all part of, and crucial to, Rose Main Reading Room’s transportive power, ever reaching for the wonder and magic of the world we live in.

With his third album as Peel Dream Magazine, Joseph Stevens beckons you toward a fabulist, zig-zag world entirely of his own design. On Pad, he eschews the fuzzy glories of his indie pop past - vibraphone trembles while chamber strings take center stage. The curtains lift to reveal banjo. Chimes. Farfisa. And as he lets out a moan atop the album's title track, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary performance. A conceptual work about losing oneself when all they have is themself, Pad gestures towards an exciting new future for Stevens' pop moniker by reimagining its own very existence. The follow-up to 2020's breakthrough album Agitprop Alterna, Pad presents a major sonic evolution for the 34 year old songwriter, who moved to Los Angeles amid the cataclysm that same year. Seventies era drum machines and synthesizers remain here, but he's traded his buzzing offset guitar for a nylon-string, opting for a gentle baroque pop sound steeped in Bossa, folk, and its own eerie mysticism. Alongside mid century touchstones like Burt Bacharach, Stevens draws on the cultishly-beloved tinkerings of late-1960s Beach Boys, offering a surreal melange of vintage organs and found percussion, as well as Harry Nilsson's 1970 song tapestry The Point!.While Pad sounds beautiful, there's a certain darkness to it as well. Stevens is addressing our general ambivalence toward the future of everything we know, informed partly by his time in New York at the onset of the pandemic. On "Hiding Out", he laments: Wander past the Vernon Mall, and up to Queensboro Bridge. Made to feel I'm two feet small, but that's no way to live. Ultimately, Stevens is embracing a first-thought-best-thought approach, leaning into the fantastical elements of his own life story. Pad is as archetypal as it is strange, blurring the very lines that it asks to be defined by. Art imitates life, but life imitates art too - and the results can sometimes be unpredictable. RIYL: Stereolab, Beach Boys circa Smile, High Llamas, Broadcast, The Lilys....

With his third album as Peel Dream Magazine, Joseph Stevens beckons you toward a fabulist, zig-zag world entirely of his own design. On Pad, he eschews the fuzzy glories of his indie pop past - vibraphone trembles while chamber strings take center stage. The curtains lift to reveal banjo. Chimes. Farfisa. And as he lets out a moan atop the album's title track, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary performance. A conceptual work about losing oneself when all they have is themself, Pad gestures towards an exciting new future for Stevens' pop moniker by reimagining its own very existence. The follow-up to 2020's breakthrough album Agitprop Alterna, Pad presents a major sonic evolution for the 34 year old songwriter, who moved to Los Angeles amid the cataclysm that same year. Seventies era drum machines and synthesizers remain here, but he's traded his buzzing offset guitar for a nylon-string, opting for a gentle baroque pop sound steeped in Bossa, folk, and its own eerie mysticism. Alongside mid century touchstones like Burt Bacharach, Stevens draws on the cultishly-beloved tinkerings of late-1960s Beach Boys, offering a surreal melange of vintage organs and found percussion, as well as Harry Nilsson's 1970 song tapestry The Point!.While Pad sounds beautiful, there's a certain darkness to it as well. Stevens is addressing our general ambivalence toward the future of everything we know, informed partly by his time in New York at the onset of the pandemic. On "Hiding Out", he laments: Wander past the Vernon Mall, and up to Queensboro Bridge. Made to feel I'm two feet small, but that's no way to live. Ultimately, Stevens is embracing a first-thought-best-thought approach, leaning into the fantastical elements of his own life story. Pad is as archetypal as it is strange, blurring the very lines that it asks to be defined by. Art imitates life, but life imitates art too - and the results can sometimes be unpredictable. RIYL: Stereolab, Beach Boys circa Smile, High Llamas, Broadcast, The Lilys....

Peel Dream Magazine Announce details of vinyl pressing of their 8-track Moral Panics EP. Featuring 6 brand new tracks and released on Tough Love Records on Friday 13th November, this follows its digital and lathe cut only release in July. Featuring the original 6 unreleased tracks recorded during the sessions for their recently released second album Agitprop Alterna which was released in April of this year, two further exclusive tracks are added to their vinyl pressing. Talking about the EP, Joe Stevens, the main artistic force behind Peel Dream Magazine said: Moral Panics is an EP featuring unreleased songs from the Agitprop Alterna recording sessions over the course of 2018 and 2019. It's kind of like a sibling to that record as well as the Up and Up EP from 2019. The title comes from Stanley Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics which talks about Mods in England during the 1960s. Cohen talks about how the English press and politicians benefited from vilifying that cultural phenomenon, and I wrote about it in the first track New Culture, as well as Permanent Moral Crisis off the LP. I'm really into everything Mod . . . I think it's something I come back to again and again. These songs definitely create their own vibe but they're still connected to Agitprop Alterna . . ." Peel Dream Magazine is the musical vehicle for NYC's Joe Stevens, who launched the band in 2018 with the critically acclaimed album Modern Meta Physic. The debut was a mysterious, liminal tribute to the hazy end of 90s dream-pop a masterful mix of first-class songwriting precision and train-window sonic impressionism. Stevens played all the parts on Modern Meta Physic himself, blending live and sampled sounds into uniquely identifiable and abstractly psychedelic soundscapes. The album struck a perfect balance between DIY bedroom pop auteurism and studio wizaJoe Stevens, the rdry, and duly found its place on numerous Best of 2018 lists. Where the creation of Modern Meta Physic was a solitary pursuit, Agitprop Alterna found Stevens channelling the collaborative spirit of the band's ever-rotating live incarnation in the studio. He worked with close friend Kelly Winrich to develop new sounds for the project, creating musical snippets that Winrich would mix into the cohering whole. Live band members like vocalist Jo-Anne Hyun (later replaced by Isabella Mingione) and drummer Brian Alvarez would stop by and work their magic on the recordings, laying down parts with trademark exactitude. The resulting music revels in its realness: heavier, more dynamic, and truly the work of a band.

Rose Main Reading Room, the fourth full length by Peel Dream Magazine, is a lush, inviting headphones record; the kind of album made to accompany city bus rides and rainy-day solo trips to accidental destinations. The band, whose name nods to the BBC Radio 1 legend John Peel — arbiter of all things underground, quality, and (it must be said) "cool" — has since its inception been a genre-hopping experiment, jumping from motorik krautrock to shoegaze and space age pop, and their newest work is a perfect starting point for the uninitiated, beckoning toward a newfound romance and nostalgia with their catchiest collection of songs to date. Across its fifteen songs, Rose Main Reading Room ultimately proposes a world of marvels and compelling complexity: “Oblast” cheekily prods at mutually assured destruction; “Ocean Life” explores the infiniteness within ourselves; while “R.I.P. (Running in Place)” unpacks an all too familiar stagnation. It’s all part of, and crucial to, Rose Main Reading Room’s transportive power, ever reaching for the wonder and magic of the world we live in.