Album Review: Ex Cops - True Hallucinations

Bands like The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart brought about a comeback to dream pop, and Brooklyn's Ex Cops have followed suit with their summery debut, True Hallucinations. The album is laden with that familiar sweet, boppy indie-pop sound, topped with the necessary amount of fuzziness to give it that nostalgic feel. It's a hard style to pull off with originality, but lucky for Ex Cops, they at least manage to do it well.

A heavily layered, dark electronic piece starts things off, and perhaps a little unfittingly so. After listening to the rest of the album, you almost forget having heard it at all. The direction of the album is then changed drastically, as Ken takes it's place and introduces the accessible warmth that can be heard throughout the rest of the album with a series of highly reverberated “oohs” and Velvets-esque shared vocals.

Each track glides so smoothly into the other it's quite easy to get lost in the velvety sweetness of it all and lose track of where one song begins and another ends. With that in mind, that's not to say there is a lack of variety. Sitting among the harmony-driven sugar of tracks like James and Spring Break (Birthday Song), Separator and Jazz & Information show off the band's range and dynamism with both tracks sharing a slightly denser sound.

Ex Cops explore a number of influences, all of which are worn proudly on their sleeves, but there's little trace of imitation and more of appropriation as they've managed to craft something recognisable as their own.