Dreamers on the Run

Album review

BMX Bandits has been kicking around since 1989—Kurt Cobain was a fan and members of Teenage Fanclub, the Vaselines and Soup Dragons have been part of the revolving-door lineup. But it wasn't until the 2017 documentary Teenage Superstars that most of us got to know frontman Douglas T. Stewart, the film's underdog hero. A kooky character at the nexus of the Glasgow indie scene in the 1990s, he has remained its heart and glue. On the group's 12th album, Stewart is in a particularly cinematic mood. "Cockerel's Waiting" leans hard into the retro Edwardian quaintness beloved by Disney's the Sherman Brothers (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Mary Poppins). Infectious "Setting Sun" plays up "Beach Blanket Bingo" whimsy, with Stewart drawing out the ends of lines like a '60s novelty one-hit wonder: "You're flyin' in the sky with nothing but the breeeeeeeze/ Sand waiting at your feet, grains softer than a sneeeeeeeze." "Dreamers on the Run" sounds like an outtake from the score to Robert Altman’s 1970 black comedy Brewster McCloud: Chamber-pop pomp and melodramatic chorale parts and super-sensitive singer-songwriter vibes, at once majestic and melancholic; even with bird song in the background, you might wonder, is it sincere or sinister? The McCloud soundtrack was put together by Papa John Phillips, and Stewart pulls off an amazing approximation of a Phillips song with "What He Set Out to Be," a romantic folk number put to a rock beat. While BMX Bandits has always been lumped in with the C86 Scottish twee scene—even though they, weirdly, weren't included on that famous NME compilation (prompting the band to name its second album C86)—they've never been gentle or naif. Yes, "The Things We Threw Away" channels romantic longing with strings and woodwinds like birds and bees fluttering through spring air. But there's always a glint of mischief and a hint of camp in the idyll. And a little Jonathan Richman on songs like "Hop Skip Jump (For Your Love)": part jive, part nursery rhyme, part cuckoo clock. Before the album's release, Stewart tweeted that Dreamers on the Run "was an album I dreamt of making 10 years ago but physical and mental health issues got in the way." On Hopeful sounding "Time to Get Away," he sings, in is quirkily distinctive timbre, of "Getting better/ Feeling sunshine/ Every day now"—then employs  brassy horns as if heralding a new dawn. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz