Daniel Land & The Modern Painters – Love Songs For The Chemical Generation LP

it’s a real shame that the sleeve is so pixelated . surely they could have used a high res image for the cd sleeve !!

One of the best recent Dreampop albums. Someone, please rerelease this on heavy slabs of vinyl :)

Love Songs For The Chemical Generation, which certainly represents my otherworldly couch-bound attitude, is now simply impossible to find on any format other than as a digital download, though in lossless format you are getting a great representation; yet sadly, sometimes one just wishes for the real thing.

To be fair, for an electronic album, this excursion is well balanced, concerted, exploring elements of Pink Floyd, Spiritualized and several other bands, all of which give the album a sense of familiarity in both time and space. In reality, which this recording seems destined to wash away, you’ll find yourself in the midst of a ebbing slow burning collaboration, one delivered by Daniel Land and a group of close knit friends out on the outer boundaries of this solar system, beaming back these delightful enchanting relays that will wrap themselves around your soul, warming you like a comforting blanket of stars, suspending you in a lucid dream, where with the right chemical intake, you just may wish the record would play on endlessly for all time.

Daniel Land certainly does deliver a heady cocktail here, nearly spiritually posing the dialectic question, “Can fantasy ever become reality, or is it best that fantasy stay just that, something lingering just out of reach, something to be strived for yet never achieved” … albeit in the case of Love Songs … I’d suggest this band of comet chasers have gotten very close to simply letting go.

I feel uneasy declaring that I thoroughly enjoy this album, nearly embarrassed, as I consider myself an avid listener of serious jazz, rock and blues, with this hazed bit of intoxication touching all the the right buttons, seamlessly drawing me in, playing on my lysergic chemical needs, taking advantage of my wobbling head and allowing me to fully engage my tripped out persona with thoughtless breathless ease as the ceiling hovers lower, the room expands and my carpet offers up more incentives than I’ve ever dared dream this world could hold … (laughing) but then, I too seem to be on a path of realizing fantasy as a reality.

With the album being over an hour long, there’s certainly material that rides better in my back pocket than others, but for now, seems I’m set on keeping it all.

*** The Fun Facts: Of the album Daniel Land says, “The title came first, in around 2001 or 2002. The songs would come later but the idea was there, born out of many nights on Manchester's clubbing scene, particularly centered around Mantos Breakfast Club, where I met Graeme Meikle and began what would be a long and fruitful musical collaboration. It was the strangest beginning to a friendship sitting on the floor of a club and talking about Spiritualized and Radiohead whilst Little Miss Natalie's hard house blared out everywhere, and people danced around us. The clubbing scene was intense and all-consuming, and in retrospect, slightly fake, but the life we lived at that time was as intense as it gets.” 

Review by Jenell Kesler

If anyone has a copy of this that they want to let go, please let me know. I'd love to have this masterpiece in my collection. Thanks!