Not many musicians can claim that they’ve been booked into major slots at festivals across the globe without having released a debut album – but Vance Joy is an exception. After relentlessly touring off the back of his chart-topping single ‘Riptide’ for almost two years, this Melbourne-born musician is finally releasing the songs to which festival-goers from around the world have mumbled newly-learnt lyrics and frantically recorded on camera phones.
Dream Your Life Away is the debut album from James Keogh, better known in the musical world as Vance Joy, following his 2013 EP God Loves You When You’re Dancing. This highly anticipated release is exactly how you would picture it to be: a soft yet uplifting collection of tunes, heavily reliant on that certain style of ukulele strumming which catapulted Vance Joy into the international spotlight in the first place.
But is his debut album just a compilation of ‘Riptide’ sound-alikes, or does it actually show a different side to the happy-go-lucky persona that Vance Joy has built for himself?
Hit
After the oddly beautiful simplicity of the lyricism in ‘Riptide’, this album is unexpectedly full of intricately crafted phrases and hooks. The smooth, emotional lyrics from ‘Mess is Mine’ right through to ‘My Kind of Man’ send you into a reflective state of mind, but not so much as to detract from the overall positive vibes radiating from this glistening debut. Not one for ambiguous references or phrases, Vance tells it like it is.
Truth be told, lines such as ‘When you think of love, do you think of pain?’ and ‘All we ever needed was time’, can sound like sermons and bitter pieces of life advice if they’re taken out of context. Luckily, the slight hint of lagging nostalgia is overcome by the hopeful positivity which blankets this entire album.
Shit
Although the minimalism within the lyricism can be relatable, it can almost be too repetitive in its ideas. The pace and arrangement of each song on the album is different, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that they all express the same sentiment, albeit in a different chord progression and vocal pattern.
The overarching sentimentality in this album could be seen as a redeeming feature – or as a lack of creativity and experimentation. On the surface, almost every track on Dream Your Life Away comes across as a slightly different approach to the same nostalgic love ballad, written for someone or something from another lifetime.
This rose-tinted perspective, despite showing a youthful innocence, has already started to label Vance Joy as the kind of musician who produces a certain type of music that is easy to pin down. If that’s what he wants, then he has done very well. If not, the thematic similarity of the tracks on this album has begun to create a niche for this musician, which could be difficult to escape from in future musical endeavours.
Hit
Despite the relatively uninspiring thematic base of most of the songs, this album has proved that Vance Joy is a powerful storyteller in his own right. Each song weaves a delicate web of a story, as he bares his soul with the backdrop of a candid acoustic guitar. ‘First Time’, a more upbeat track towards the end of the album, captures this perfectly. From the opening lines of this track, the listener is transported to a different time, reliving ‘that summer night’ as if you were there all along.
Tracks such as the tentative ‘Wasted Time’ and emotion-drenched ‘Georgia’ display this storytelling skill: around 3 minutes of blissful guitar and tentative vocals later, and you suddenly realise just how captivating Vance Joy’s vocal arrangements can be.
The well-thought out lyrics, impeccable production and strong backbone of each song show that Dream Your Life Away isn’t an album that Vance Joy has taken lightly. This gentle outlet of expression shows off a timid, caring nature, previously hidden by the upbeat, infectious happiness of hyped-up ‘Riptide’. It’s refreshing to hear so much emotion invested in a debut album, instead of filling it up with catchy, generic pop songs just to make sales.
Shit
Again, a huge contradiction. The openness of the songs is wonderfully endearing, but the album as a whole is lacking in flow. Dream Your Life Away is light and uplifting at times, which should lend itself to being an easy listen, but the songs don’t quite mesh well together in their order. On one hand, the track listing of the album tends to jump from an up-tempo track supported by multiple instrumentalists to a slower, saccharine song, creating a slightly frantic atmosphere during transitions.
On the opposite side of the argument, as the album progresses past popular singles ‘Riptide’ and ‘Mess is Mine’, everything gradually rolls into one and the difference between songs becomes far less prominent. Occasionally sounding like a more relaxed version of Mumford and Sons, it becomes all too easy to think of the entire album as just one well-arranged folk jam session.
The Verdict: Hit
Overall, it’s a beautiful debut: picture a compilation of sweet, laid-back tunes to listen to on a lazy Sunday afternoon. But is it enough to sustain it as a ‘hit’ album? Although there are some occasional downfalls, Dream Your Life Away is smooth and deliciously appealing in a way that ‘Riptide’ alone was not. The catchy, upbeat-yet-mellow pop song of 2013 falls by the wayside in this release – overpowered by the serene simplicity of heartfelt lyricism and a solo ukulele.
This album has come out just at the right time: the torrent of appreciation for ‘Riptide’ is finally slowing down and summer is just around the corner. If the success of last year’s Triple J Hottest 100 winning single is anything to go by, punters will be flooding into festivals like Falls this year to catch Vance Joy performing his ever-growing repertoire. Soundtrack to summer, anyone?
