Album Review- Johnny Marr- Fever Dream Parts 1-4

Johnny Marr’s solo career has been unlikely. When everyone might have expected him to cash in on his fame in the 90s and 00s, he played the hired gun. It’s probably for the best as when he finally launched a serious solo career, there weren’t unwieldy expectations. Fever Dreams Parts 1-4 is the new album. Conceptually, it is a double album consisting of 4 EPs. (In reality, only the first two EPs were released individually as such). Perhaps for this reason (if not literally then perhaps psychologically), this doesn’t feel like an album any more than it does a group of songs. Maybe there is also an inevitability of a letdown after his last couple of records like 2018s Call the Comet and the non-album single Armatopia (which went synth heavy) were so strong. If you read one of the many negative review of Fever Dreams, I will tell you the comments therein are correct. The production and mix tend to treat the music in such a way that a lot of songs fade from memory- “background music” someone called it and I tend to agree. There certainly is a tendency for the songs to sound similar to Marr acolytes. Someone mentioned the Strokes and I’m not sure of that, but certainly there are similarities to this new crop of Marr influenced bands like NewDad. But that’s only half of the story. There are 16 songs here and at least a few are strong singles -songs like All These Days, Gods Gift, Ghoster, Tenement Time, Night and Day and Spirit Power and Soul. Those songs alone are enough to justify this CD length (or 2 Record) album and makes it stand out as a worthwhile choice for any fan of Marr and his similar sounding contemporaries like New Order and Suede. So the casual listener might not be instantly attracted to this mix match of styles with some filler, but I think a few years down the road, Fever Dreams will hold solid in the Marr discography. For your audio needs, here’s God’s Gift. With Marr, there’s much more to his career than the Smiths, but this song about an egotistical blowhard, well, one comes to mind anyway.