Misadventures Of Doomscroller

Though the title of may be an apt description of what Dawes leader and songwriter Taylor Goldsmith has been up to during the turbulent years since the band's last album in 2020, Misadventures of Doomscroller is also him working in his usual impeccably crafted mainstream Southern California-meets-The Band pop rock way. Musically, this is almost a pure singer-songwriter album, with Goldsmith's vocals as the focus of the mix. Ambition peaks in the first track, "Someone Else's Café / Doomscroller Tries To Relax," where after a line about making "face paint out of baby blood" Wylie Gelber (bass), Lee Pardini, (keyboards) and Griffin Goldsmith (drums) launch into a proggy, keyboard-led instrumental midsection before breaking out into a repeated ending choruses of "So let's enjoy each other's company/ On the brink of our despair/ Does someone have a song to sing/ Or a joke that they could share?" which Taylor Goldsmith sings in his strong falsetto. On "Ghost in the Machine," the band gets into a lively rhythmic groove with Pardini's keys rocking hard and Goldsmith adding a buoyant guitar solo. "Turning madness into waveforms/ Searching chords for what's beneath," he sings.  Misadventures of Doomscroller was recorded by Grant Millikin and produced by Jonathan Wilson (who also produced Dawes' debut) at his Five Star Studios in Los Angeles; the sound is uncompressed and beautifully balanced. But if the music has grown professional and predictable, Goldsmith's lyrics continue to grow sharper, which he makes that clear in "Everything is Permanent."  After references to "perks of knowing how to lip sync" and "a wilderness of gossip" he sings "A wayward strand of anger/ At some controversial stranger/ Who swears the virus didn't exist." Even the lesser songs in this seven-song sampling of Goldsmith's talents, like "Joke In There Somewhere," contain vivid lyrical moments: "But he says, every time we've sat here/ Getting nervous for the future/ We've ended up some version of ok/ These songs that we are singing/ Shouldn't give in to the rumors/ They should give some kind of strength to meet the day." Ever the autobiographical songwriter, Goldsmith's anxiety comes to an eloquent head in the finale "Sound That No One Made / Doomscroller Sunrise'' with a detailed tableau that reaches for universality: "As we pull off of the freeway a hospital appears/ I see a man up in the window on the back end of his years/ And I imagine him there dying with that ringing in his ears/ That we all end up with someday/ There's a code within the symptom, a morbid sort of sign/ The ominous reminder of the body's slow decline/ As constant as a heartbeat but stronger over time/ While the rest of us decays/ Listening to a sound that no one made." © Robert Baird/Qobuz