Jam City: Dream a Garden review – modern psychedelia with a dark edge

Announced via last year’s single Unhappy, producer Jack Latham’s radical new direction did not meet with untrammelled delight from fans of his previous work. It’s obvious why. His acclaimed debut Classical Curves offered post-dubstep club music, but if you had to characterise its successor, you’d be more likely to describe it as shoegazing: it features Latham’s wispy vocals buried beneath woozy electronics. But Dream a Garden is infinitely more inventive than that label suggests. The cover pairs the bucolic title against an image of rubble, which fits the music perfectly: the melodies are often beatific – never more so than on Today – but the rhythms frequently have a disturbing industrial edge to them, and sounds dart in and out of the mix at odd volumes, according to a logic known only to Latham himself. It’s strange and disorientating, idiosyncratic and frequently astonishing, a modern-day psychedelia that owes almost nothing to that genre’s hackneyed conventions and never forgets to