Coming Up: Goon at Saturn

On Monday, Goon comes to Saturn.

The Los Angeles band is currently touring on their latest surreal shoegaze effort, Dream 3. The album’s echoing, lo-fi psychedelia is a sound they’ve mastered by this point, and while the songwriting still features frontman Kenny Becker’s kaleidoscopic imagery, the songs took shape during a tumultuous time in his life.

After the band entered the studio to record Dream 3, Becker’s marriage come to an end, and the songs written for brighter days then broke open to make room for grief and emotional upheaval. The result is sometimes uplifting, sometimes frenzied, even troubling, but always compelling.

Art by Kenny Becker.

And the songs are still evolving. Now that Goon* has embarked on tour, Becker has gained some distance from the heartbreak days of the initial recording and allowed the music to take on new life on stage.

“It feels great,” says Becker. “They definitely feel even more different from their origins now, in a way like I feel as though they aren’t ‘mine’ anymore. It’s been a beautiful privilege to get to share these tunes in a live setting with people that know them.”

Instrumentation on Dream 3’s opening track, “Begin Here,” is optimistically upbeat, expansive, and reverberating, while Becker’s delivery is somber and gentle, the whole song like a still heart starting to beat again. The track leads in with a reversed guitar, a song started backward.

“I’ve always loved manipulating recordings and sorta seeing what comes out on the other side,” says Becker. “But in this case, it seemed interesting to try and have a chord progression operate “forwards” while being reversed. So basically we recorded the chord progression in backwards order, and then reversed that. I remember this idea first occurring to me when I heard a snippet called “Wouldn’t You Like to Be Free?” from Boards of Canada’s unreleased album Play by Numbers.”

The sound mutates from there, nodding ‘90s grunge in “Fruit Cup,” which drifts in and out of a void of distortion. Concrete narratives bow out in favor of abstract imagery, and the album’s sonic storytelling gives just enough for the listener to put the pieces of a scene together. “Apple Patch” starts with the narrator “shaking with a smile” at a pharmacy before cutting to them as they “lay awakened under the knife,” and later “up with the sick sunrise” and presumably preparing for anesthesia.

If we tried to identify the stages of grief within Dream 3, “Patsy’s Twin” is where we’d find anger. It begins tranquil enough, with “Cicadas in the yard.” The melody leans a half-step into dissonance with the ominous line “Animal sounds, doom for a pigeon,” just before being t-boned by overdriven, chugging chords. The song is aggravated and unsettling, highlighted with pained screams and erratic guitar licks before snapping back to a serenity that the listener can no longer trust.

Goon lifts spirits with the album’s instrumental track, “Toluca.” Bright guitar chords twinkle in a firmament of bass and cinematic reverb, always building up as if anything could happen next. When tasked with naming the track, Becker looked back to a place where feelings blend.

“There’s a place at home in LA called Toluca Lake, and I’ve always loved that name,” he says. “The area is now a fully developed neighborhood, but I’ve always found that evocative, beautifully ancient name to be so cool. It felt like the perfect word to describe the blissed-out yet deeply melancholy feeling the instrumental gave me.”

Two streams met to make Dream 3. The lighter, brighter songwriting Becker had prepared for, and the deep and dark waters that he found himself in during the recording process. The collision is powerful and churning and often threatens to pull his delicate vocals under. But it works. The album is in turns stirring and soothing, chaotic and calm, all suspended in the lo-fi ambience Goon is known for.

It’s also a testament to the difference support can make when you’re going through hard times. Going back to “Begin Here,” Becker ends the song repeating “Let me cry to Tamara,” crediting the band’s bassist, Tamara Simons as a shoulder to cry on.

He says, “There’s no way this record would exist in the way it does, or at all really, without the help and loving support of my closest and most beloved friends.”

If you enjoy Elliot Smith’s softly somber vocals, moodier Radiohead, or even Birmingham’s The Grenadines, Dream 3 belongs in your record collection, and you shouldn’t miss the chance to see this band live.

Goon will play at Saturn this Monday, September 22, joined by Hot Spit. Doors at 7 p.m., music at 8 p.m. Visit the venue’s website for info and tickets.

*Language is always evolving, and the band’s choice of name predates modern applications of the term.