Kali Dreamer can finally see the dawn on ‘Imperfect Dark’

On 2022 album October Requiem: 1988, Kali Dreamer tended to work with at least one foot planted in the grave, his narrators offering their final words while swinging from the noose (“Gallows Type Thing”) or standing positioned on the edge of some great, consuming abyss (“Corpse Boyfriend”).

Imperfect Dark, which releases digitally on Friday, Feb. 14, reads as something of a thaw, in contrast, the goth rocker embracing dreamier, shoegaze-indebted textures and a perspective that at least borders on hopeful. “Do you really want to die like this?” Dreamer sings on “Tiara,” a brutally cathartic track shot through with steely resilience. Where on past efforts the musician might have answered this question in the affirmative, within the context of these songs it appears the scale might have finally tipped in the opposite direction. 

“When I made the last album, we were in the middle of Covid … and every day it was like someone I knew was dead – one of my friends, one of my friend’s friends. And it was like, man, who’s next? It felt like the end of everything. And it was something you couldn’t get away from,” said Dreamer, who added that recent years have introduced a sense of perspective and allowed him to grow some distance from the nihilism that formerly consumed him. “Before when I was writing music, it was like, I’m going to struggle here and then I’m going to die, and that’s it. But that’s a selfish, solipsistic way to look at things. Now it’s like, maybe I can write a song, or maybe some random kid will hear a riff off one of my tracks and be like, ‘I want to take up guitar.’ And now maybe you live on through that person who only took up guitar because they heard one of your songs. I’m not looking at things with the same finality anymore. Now I can see that maybe death is the end of you here, but there’s a continuance and you are kind of passing those melodies down the generations.”

“Glamor Rot,” a confessional track tied to the discomfort the self-professed introvert has always felt in regard to self-promotion, unfolds as further evidence of this pivot. “I tortured myself,” Dreamer sings, his use of the past tense suggestive of a different road taken. Similar ideas surface in “Bathory Bomb,” a dancing, new wave-indebted track on which the musician professes a desire to “make it right in another life.” “New Twilight,” in turn, plays like an extended sigh, building on melodic, twinkling guitars that stretch and preen like a cat awaking in an early morning sunbeam.

Not that Dreamer has completely abandoned the darkness. Witness songs such as “Grandfather Guillotine,” which centers on gleaming, metallic guitar riffs that fall as heavy as thick steel blades, and “Tiara,” a damaged cut that could be interpreted as either a romantic falling out or a purging of self-hatred, and which finds Dreamer delivering one of his most fractured, emotionally bruising vocals to date.

“I remember how awkward it was in the studio, because when we were first trying to record the song, [producer] Derek [Christopher] was like, ‘It just sounds like you’re reading. I don’t like how it sounds,’” said Dreamer, who then tried a handful of alternate takes. “He was like, ‘Pick up the guitar and play when you’re singing, and maybe it will feel more like a live performance.’ But then I was too focused on the guitar, so he was like, ‘I want you to dig deep into whatever this song is about, whatever caused it.’ And I was like, all right, cool. And then I started getting the jitters and I started crying really hard. And my voice is wavering the whole time I’m recording my vocals, and I’m thinking there’s no way this can sound good. And at the end, I looked over at Derek, and he was like, ‘Whoa.’ And he was just kind of stunned, like, ‘I think we need to take a break.’” And he was apologizing for putting me there, but it was what the song needed. … There’s something to being able to harness a horrible thing that happened to you and using it to push yourself forward. I think there’s a real power in that.”

In fleshing out the album’s sonic worlds, Dreamer said he entered into sessions hoping to capture the feel evoked by a level of “Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting,” from 1992, which he described as being set in “what the Japanese [game developers] thought England looked like.” “So, there’s a bridge and a castle and an aurora in the background,” he continued. “And I wanted the album to sound like that picture.”

“In Loving Misery” perhaps captures this aesthetic best, balancing gothic sadness with an ethereal shimmer and emerging as a song in which the musician begins to make an uneasy peace with his internal demons. “This misery is such a task to hide,” Dreamer sings as the tune thrashes through a final fit of night sweats. 

“People will give you this advice on how to progress, and it’s all about tackling your demons or being at war with them, but a lot of those demons are an intrinsic part of you, and you really can’t kill them, so you have to find healthy ways to coexist with them,” he said. “And there’s definitely a lot of that happening in that song, and a lot of identifying my unhealthy coping mechanisms. And I don’t want to speak as somebody who’s conquered all of these situations and knows 100 percent what’s going on. But for sure I’m working, and we’ll just put it like that.”