In the dream, you’ve crash-landed some kind of flying object into a billowy bed of lilacs somehow blooming out of season in October and, stranger still, unconnected to any trees. It’s dusk. Who knows where you’ve landed. Point is, you’re safe; you’ve survived. You emerge from the nonwreckage and decide to do a little gardening in this beautiful and unfamiliar place and time of life. Does gardening help you reassume control?
As you sink your hands into the soil, Jeff Tweedy seems to be singing a song called “Twilight Gardener” in your earbuds. Except it’s not Wilco’s affable frontman and the band behind him has wandered somewhere more surreal; it’s psychedelic, lo-fi, lilting and untethered to the earth.
The Tweedyesque voice belongs to Scott H., who records under the moniker Scott Klon and fronts the project Great Klons. Joining him on the newest Great Klons EP, “Visions of Exile,” is a familiar Rochester indie cast that includes Katie Morey (vocals) and Ben Morey (keyboards, organ, synths), Billy Martin (drums), Vivian Rolker (violin) and Courtney Hastings (violin). They make laidback music.
“Twilight Gardener” features the line Kids are halfway grown, twilight gardener, which might resonate with any parent or caregiver who’s internalized that old cliche about the days being long but the years flying by. It hit me hard. Seasons pass so quickly.
“Recurring Common Dream,” meanwhile, is punctuated by gorgeously disorienting delays and bloops and blips reminiscent of Radiohead’s “OK Computer” — or, heck, even Hüsker Du’s “Dreams Reoccuring” — not because Great Klons sounds like either band, but because all three of them seem to find slivers of beauty in places of alienation.
That’s where “Visions of Exile” leaves you: somewhere surreal but unthreatening, hands in the dirt, dusk coming on, trying to tend to whatever’s managed to grow here.
