A Dream Is All We Know

Recorded
Released

Long Island siblings Brian and Michael D’Addario first bounded into view with 2016’s Do Hollywood, a wildly enthusiastic surge of power pop and glam rock that along with marking the brothers as keen retro fetishists, also showed some precociously fine-tuned songwriting chops. As on 2023’s Everything Harmony, A Dream Is All We Know sees the pair calming down some of their more theatrical tendencies (2018’s Go To School was rock opera about a monkey enrolling in high school) to focus their energies on the music. Not a note here betrays the influence of anything recorded after the release of Big Star’s first album (“The Eyes Of The Girl” essentially a cover of The Beach Boys’ “In My Room,” “Ember Days” a deftly executed Simon & Garfunkel pastiche), but their reanimation of 60s rock and pop is so sumptuous, so melodically rich and so guileless that it’s impossible not to fall for its charms.

Chris Catchpole