Impossible Dream
Haley Bonar
GNDWIRE/Thirty Tigers
Four stars
The songs on Impossible Dream are personal yet universal, with an indie-film ambience detailed enough to fill a larger screen. The 33-year-old Haley Bonar turned it up a notch on her previous album, 2014's Last War, and this one continues in a similar vein: gliding power-pop that's more in-your-ear than in-your-face.
The cinematic textures are enhanced by her voice, awash in reverb, and echoing layers of instruments, all at the service of vignettes – “borne of my own set of memories and ideas” – in which anguish and uncertainty are far from conquered.
"Hometown goes wherever you go," she says in the airy opener Hometown, followed by the supple Your Mom is Right and the slow burn of Kismet Kill.
At 32 minutes, the album is as short as it is affecting. "It's all on credit anyway, until we're out of things to say," Bonar says on closer Blue Diamonds Fall. She deserves to run up as large a tab as she needs.
artslife@thenational.ae
