Send "Dreamers of the Ghetto " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Dreamers of the Ghetto frontman Luke Jones has this great big voice; not just recording-booth big, but grain-silo big, the kind so rousing, so grandiose, it'd overpower anything short of an anthem. And so Dreamers of the Ghetto write anthems, all these great big songs to go with their frontman's great big voice. Enemy/Lover, their debut LP, is not just indie rock-club big. It's mainstage big. Listening to Enemy/Lover, it takes no stretch of the imagination to see the band's long name inching its way toward the top of all sorts of bills in the months ahead.Enemy/Lover works in widescreen, searching verses crashing into sweeping choruses, Jones shouting big questions at the sky. Towering and triumphal, Dreamers take most of their cues from stadium-fillers from U2 to Springsteen to indie overgrounders like Arcade Fire and the National. I sometimes hear an optimism-infused spin on much-missed Canadian rockers Constantines; listen close, and you'll pick up hints of Rod Stewart, Simple Minds, and Coldplay. It's not that Dreamers of the Ghetto sound especially like any one of these, but that they sound a bit like all of them, and just about anybody else who's ever stretched the canvas out as far as it goes. Nearly every note on Enemy/Lover is pitched as far as it'll fly; subtlety, as befits a band who would call itself Dreamers of the Ghetto, isn't exactly job one. More room under the big tent that way, I reckon. A panoramic guitar figure and a stampede of drums set the scene for the ponderous "State of a Dream", a slice of Inception-style uncertainty blown up to billboard size. It's bettered by "Connection", its bleary, solitary organ giving way to its towering chorus, "When you're gone, I know you're with me." This is no mild disruption in the REM cycle or absence-addled fondness; both songs find Jones practically doubled-over from pleading, bouncing those lines off a (for now, imaginary) sea of thousands. The constant craving in Jones' throat keeps Enemy/Lover well-suited for a solitary bedroom hideout, but its insistent songs aim for anyone within earshot. The Dreamers aren't seeking some midpoint between intimacy and grandiosity, they're aiming for both at once; that same combination's kept Bono in leather and wraparounds for decades now, a rarified territory these Dreamers seem almost born into....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| Last month, Dreamers of the Ghetto played a headlining spot at Raleigh's Hopscotch Music Festival, an honor they shared with such indie giants as Superchunk, Guided By Voices, and the Flaming Lips. The bold curatorial choice to let these relative newcomers play the big City Plaza stage rather than one of the dozen or so small venues participating in the festival made a lot more sense if you'd heard the band's style of atmospheric arena rock, which updates the well-tested chime-and-holler of U2 by anchoring it in the type of moody synth tones definitive of indie's current moment. Like fellow luminaries of the school of big, sad rock anthems (say, Low or Explosions in the Sky), Dreamers of the Ghetto make music that's suited just as well to the privacy of headphones as to the stadium, settled just at the vanishing point between isolation and universality. It's gorgeous when it all comes together, but that doesn't happen nearly enough on Enemy/Lover. Though its title is strongly suggestive of duality, Enemy/Lover is fairly one-note, a nearly invariable collection of anthems gravitating toward the sludgier end of midtempo. If the first half of the anthem slips occasionally into sameiness, the second practically capitulates: Songs like "Always," "Phone Call," and "Tether" aren't better than their predecessors, they're just longer. These would-be showstoppers simply scale up the same dynamic employed on the album's shorter tunes, and in doing so confirm that a formula is indeed in place. Ominous synths move in, their enveloping darkness eventually pierced by electric guitar, with singer Luke Jones finally settling his ragged howl on a rallying cry to be repeated, mantra-like, until the end of the song. These deliberate build-ups never climax in an especially satisfying way. Where U2 would use a soaring chorus and Explosions in the Sky would employ a surge of guitars, Dreamers of the Ghetto favor repetition as route and destination....full text |
| Thesilvertongueonline |
| Little is known about the rock group Dreamers of the Ghetto. In fact, most of what I know about them is what I was able to intuit from their début, “Enemy/Lover”. I would guess that they work incredibly hard on their music, that they have a a great appreciation and understanding of their craft and those that came before them, and that they would probably name “atmosphere” as one of the more important parts of putting a record together. With certainty, I can only really say one thing about Dreamers of the Ghetto; they released a damn good début. It’s a record that doesn’t just stay solid throughout; it’s a record that builds and gloriously explodes. “Antenna” opens the album, and provides a short, soft build which perfectly sets up the kick of the first track of the album, “The State of a Dream”. Dreamers of the Ghetto waste no time hitting you with a sound that seems both ethereal and encompassing as well as strangely gritty. It isn’t a line between sounds that’s walked; it’s two styles that seem as if they should cancel each other out working in tandem. It’s sound that’s unique and, importantly, understood and intelligently used by the band – a sound that continues throughout “Enemy/Lover”, though on different songs the different sides switch between foreground and background. The title of “Enemy/Lover” speaks well to the tone of the album. It ignores the idea of an emotional dichotomy, and while this may spell doom for lesser albums, Dreamers of the Ghetto manage to pull it off. The hope of the celestial and loss of the earthly on Enemy/Lover work well together because there seems to be one unifying lyrical and melodic thread tying them together; longing. Enemy/Lover is at once nostalgic for safer, happier times, and yet also optimistically looking forward. By the end of the record, the darker plummets on the record seem perfectly balanced out with the moments of rapture. No song better captures this than the penultimate track, Night Hawks, a song that manages to be both grounded and detached, hopeful and foreboding, creating a picture as unsure and foreboding as the Edward Hopper painting it takes its name from....full text |
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