Dream Pop
Warm, Hazy, Restrained Pop at a Walking Pace
It loops more than it develops. The chords are extended, so maj7, m7 and ninths, and they
are there for colour rather than tension, sitting still for a bar or two at a time. Underneath
run a drum machine and an acoustic kit together, the machine locked to the grid and the kit
drifting around it. The reverb is structural here rather than garnish.
The Guitar Side of Dream Pop
Dream pop starts with Cocteau Twins, but this is the guitar side of it, rooted in
Slowdive in the early nineties and carried on by Beach House. Ringing guitars play for texture
over an electric bass, inside real verses and choruses. Think Craft Spells or Wild Nothing, a
picked rhythm guitar under a lead, or The Radio Dept., a chiming guitar over an arp. Cigarettes
After Sex is the restrained end, very little going on inside an ordinary song. Hatchie's
brighter and poppier, Still Corners slower and more cinematic. Whether a guitar is carrying a
song tells you which of these it leans towards.
Why It’s Dream Pop
A dream pop song sits in 4/4 at a walking pace, over a sparse kit where a drum machine holds the grid and an acoustic one drifts around it. The production's hazy because the
reverb is part of the structure. Seventh chords change slowly and sit still for a bar or two,
and the song loops more than it builds. Leave any of that out and you're in a neighbouring
genre, which is where lo-fi and glitch usually end up.
The Chords It’s Built From
Written as numbers rather than letters, because a progression is a shape and the shape works in any key. I is the chord you start from, V is the fifth step up, and lower case means minor. So I V vi IV in C is C, G, Am, F.
major
About three songs in four. The default. Every major loop in the genre is open to it.
I IV6%I V ii IV6%I vi6%V I5%IV I IV V4%ii V I vi3%
and 82 rarer loops this mode can take
minor
About one song in six. Darker, and it uses its own pool rather than the major one.
VII i VI19%i VII12%v iv i8%III i v VII8%
and 14 rarer loops this mode can take
dorian
About one song in twenty. Minor with a raised sixth, so the fourth chord comes out major where a minor key would give you a minor one. Home and that major fourth carry it.
IV VI ii v IV IIIIII VII IV VIIi IVi IV i VIIi III VII IVIV i VIIIV i VII IV i
mixolydian
About one song in eighty. Major with a flat seventh, so the chord a tone below home is major rather than diminished. The loops sit on home and that flat seventh.
I ♭VIII ♭VII IV ♭VIII IV ♭VII IV♭VII I IV♭VII IV I ♭VII IV
lydian
About one song in eighty. Major with a raised fourth, so the four chord comes out diminished and the loops leave it out. The major two carries it instead.
I III II V III V vi IIII I VII I V II I
Most songs are major and most of the rest minor. About one in fourteen goes modal, usually dorian, while mixolydian and lydian each come up in about one song in eighty. A song
keeps its key and mode to the last bar.
Chords from outside the key are rare here, and they're always ones this genre's
bands play. Most are the major three, which pulls toward the six the way a five pulls home, or
the major two, which does the same for the five. A minor song reaches out more often, mostly
for the major five. Every part follows the chord, so over E major in C nobody holds a G natural
or lands on one.
They also move slowly. A chord holds a bar through most of a song and two bars through
intros and outros. That's what separates this from pop changing chord every two beats, and it
leaves the wash somewhere to sit.
A bridge slows down further. It takes a progression carrying a chord the song hasn't played yet, and where it has the bars for the whole thing, each chord gets twice the length it has either side. The drums move to a groove of their own and the lead turns its idea upside down, over chords changing half as often.
Some songs break for an instrumental between two sung sections, and the odd one has two. Nobody sings in it. Unlike a bridge it brings no new chord, just the intro's progression where the intro moves through one, or the verse's where it doesn't. Underneath, the band from the section before usually carries on without the singer, at the verse's level and the verse's pace of chord changes. It runs four, eight, twelve, sixteen or twenty-four bars, each as often as records near its tempo break for that long, whatever the genre. A break lasts about the same number of seconds at any tempo. So a fast song's instrumental runs more bars and a slow song's fewer.
Before the second chorus it's a link, taking the song back into a verse, and where the intro had a tune, the same instrument plays it again. Anywhere else the lead carries the instrumental on its own figure. There's no solo.
Songwriting lore says a chorus should arrive home on the chord it opened with. Here a chorus ends where its own loop ends. A section that resolves has stopped, and these songs don't stop.
How Much Colour a Chord Takes
A seventh is what turns a plain major chord into the hazy one this genre runs on. A suspension swaps the third for the note above or below it, so the chord hangs unresolved until it drops back.
Sevenths are the default here rather than an ornament. About half of the chords in a song take one, where pop normally leaves a triad plain and saves the seventh for a moment. Suspensions are much rarer, and plenty of songs have none at all.
How much of either a song gets is settled once and held all the way through, so one song comes out heavy with them and the next is mostly plain. Two bands with the same influences still write differently. Decide it chord by chord and every song drifts to the same middle, which is how a run ends up sounding like one song over and over.