hot dreams

For four records Timber Timbre traded in dread — reverb-soaked, gothic, Taylor Kirk singing like he’s watching you from across a dark room. On the title track of 2014’s Hot Dreams he keeps the dark room and changes what happens in it. The menace is still there; it has just been asked to slow-dance.

Kirk wrote the album after leaving Ontario for Los Angeles, and you can hear the Laurel Canyon light leaking into a band that had never let any in. The title cut is a waltz that barely moves — a slow, lounge-lit sway — until Colin Stetson’s saxophone arrives and takes over the seduction the vocal is too composed to finish. Stetson is the man who makes solo bass-sax records that sound like machinery breathing; here he’s asked to be plush and lovestruck instead, and he obliges completely. The song is a proposition delivered in a croon so straight-faced you can’t tell whether it’s sincere or a joke about sincerity, and the not-knowing is half of why it works. Put it on late, with the lights low — it was built for exactly that, and knows it.