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Johnny Marr's fourth studio album, Fever Dreams 1-4, is a powerful electro-rock opus; a double album that has an attention-span challenging sixteen tracks. Given Johnny's involvement in Electronic, his project with New Order's Bernard Sumner, this is no departure for him and much of the material here reminds me of their underrated second album, Raise The Pressure – dark, catchy and very easy to listen to without being overly commercial. Whilst I do think this album is a little too long and could be trimmed down a little without any real harm to the enjoyment of the listening experience, there are some superb tracks here if you have the time to listen and re-listen to the record and let the individual gems reveal themselves to you. My personal favourite is probably Ariel (which I later learned was based on a Sylvia Plath poem), closely followed by Night And Day, a track about the very relatable subject of being overwhelmed by modern living backed by a powerful, relentless, eminently danceable electro-indie beat. The final song on the album, Human, is a very welcome change of pace from everything you've just experienced, with its more gentle acoustic guitar backed verses and yet a rather glorious, spine-tingling chorus and it became one of my top tracks on the album the first time I heard it.
If Fever Dreams 1-4 suffers from anything, its a slight homogeneous feeling to the whole album; too many songs have the same musical feel as each other. It may be a suitable record to put on in the background and, dare I say, work out to or perhaps get some chores done, and certain tracks have a powerful, driving characteristic that would sound great in an indie club (Tenement Time, for example), but listening to it from start to finish is a moderate test of patience and, frankly, I'm not at all into the concept of background music; for me, music is to focus on, to listen to attentively and to enjoy. It seems odd that most of these songs sound best on their own, on a random playlist, than they do all together – and that's not exactly a great quality for an album to have. Nothing on Fever Dreams is poor, but there are definitely some unremarkable, forgettable tracks and, on the whole, they bring the album down a little. It has bags of merit and more than a handful of banging tunes, but Fever Dreams 1-4, for me, is sadly no modern classic.
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