Aaron Jackson reviews Everything, Everything – Fever Dream
You wait for six months for an album to knock your socks off and then two do it in the space of a month. Everything Everything’s Fever Dream hasn’t quite usurped PSB’s In Every Valley as my album of the year so far, but it took the fight deep into the championship rounds. For aficionados, there’s less leaping from time-signature to time-signature and more emphasis on being direct, but that doesn’t mean predictable. Lead-off single ‘Can’t Do’ feels built for communal sweat of playing live while ‘Desire’ arrives with the sort of chorus that fills stadiums. To get to these, you have to through album opener ‘Night of the Long Knives.’ It’s a slow-burn, but a rewarding one that heralds the more synth-heavy direction of the album. There’s plenty of guitar, too, but this is an album of layers and textures. The title track is, frankly, gorgeous: a Gregorian chorus giving way to plangent piano and vocals before a hypnotic dance-vibe drops and kicks the hook skywards. It gets a little loose for me as we head down the stretch, but this is definitely more than just a contender.
9/10
