Dead Slow's first single ‘Star’ draws the listener in with a mellow groove, driven by Rhodes keys and fuzzy lead guitar, before opening up into five minutes of lush, melodic dreampop. The track nods to Real Estate and My Morning Jacket along the way, winding towards its cosmic instrumental outro. The accompanying music video mirrors this trajectory, with the band hatching a conspiratorial plot to make contact with two black-eyed aliens by branding their patch of earth with the shape of a star. ‘Treadmills’, the second single, is a jangly waltz that dances through several motifs before layering on woozy psychedelia as the Flaming Lips might have done. The two tracks tease out the dynamism of Harwood and Tickell’s songwriting; Tickell lets his jangly pop envelop the listener, while Harwood’s songs are more ‘60s inflected, stitching together disparate ideas in the spirit of Elephant 6. Adding to the songwriting oeuvre is drummer Ingles’ offering ‘Melt’ - a woozy, ambling epic nodding to early noughts psych pop of The Black Angels and Dead Meadow. They’re drawn together in a coherent whole, though, through jammy, motorik-driven outros and an ambient haze that hovers over the album’s eight tracks.
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