Drama Dust Dream

Drama Dust Dream, released on 22 July 2022, is the fourth album, breaking fourteen years of Dreamtide's silence. A long time had passed and the rhythm section was renewed. With the core of Helge Engelke, Olaf Senkbeil and Torsten Lüderwaldt intact, Lars Lehmann — who has worked with UFO and Uli Jon Roth — came in on bass, and Horst Guntram Schlag on drums. Twelve songs, fifty-three minutes. The band's aim has not changed over the years: to answer, in songs, a tradition of rock with roots in the late sixties and early seventies. In an age of programming and cut-and-paste, they push through on the human smell of hands on instruments. “Ni Dos Ni Agua” is an instrumental with a Spanish scent, and “A Fairy Prank” likewise reflects Engelke's craft — in neither is technique paraded; the song itself comes forward. Two singers can be heard on “Merciless Sun.” It became, in the end, the last record. Engelke died in 2023. Fair Warning, Zeno, Dreamtide: the records he was part of all shaped what came to be called melodic rock across the 80s and 90s. That his final one is a document of hands playing against the machine has a certain logic to it.