Indie pop artist Rachel Kiel’s sound is like a complex but delicious cocktail – there’s a lot of ingredients contributing, sometimes there’s a surprising flavor, but at the end of the day it’s irresistable. On October 23, she’ll be releasing her new album Dream Logic. In conjunction with the announcement of her new album, we’re excited to premiere the video for her new single “Car Crash Dream.”
While the subject matter (and certainly the title) of “Car Crash Dream” leans towards heavier subject matter, musically it’s full of sugary hooks, deft but powerful guitar work and layers upon layers of carefully arranged instrumentation. It opens with one guitar playing a palm-muted riff as an other comes over the top with a slide-y guitar riff that kicks in Kiel’s vocals. She has a sort of plainspoken yet very appealing vocal style that recalls Neko Case at her most power-pop-perfect moments with The New Pornographers.
If the melodies, uptempo pacing and meticulous don’t draw you in, the video for “Car Crash Dream” will. It features lush imagery that’s evocative of a humid summer, the sun’s glare on a car window opening the video before cutting between scenes of Kiel washing a car and posing for the camera. She dancing to the song throughout the video as she sings along, at one point wearing what can only be described as a confetti jacket.
“‘Car Crash Dream’ deals with fear, and especially, my history of recurring nightmares: of dying in a car crash—usually because my foot can’t reach the pedals; of bathtub vampires—vampires that attack while you’re naked and vulnerable in the tub; of strangers invading the shed that’s visible from my childhood bedroom window—a dream that I still have, in spite of the fact that I haven’t lived in my parents’ house for years,” said Kiel. “The line ‘They don’t go, they just change their names’ is my acknowledgement that fears don’t always go away. I’m not afraid of vampires anymore, but that fear has morphed into other, more adult ones—what other people think of me, whether I’ll get injured, etc. At the bottom, maybe it’s all the same fear. I wanted the song to be a danceable rejection of that fear, a way to let go of its power over me and see my life open up as a result.”
Dream Logic track list
1. “Car Crash Dream”
2. “Late Night Drive”
3. “Watch Yourself”
4. “Keep That in Your Pocket”
5. “Favorite Work”
6. I Don’t Need You
7. “Do What You Want”
8. “Sincere”
9. “Discipline”
10. “Ava Gardner”
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