Cinnamon Chasers’ ‘Dreams & Machines’ album

To those in the know, those who really follow Dreamwave, or Nu-Disco, or SynthWave, or whatever we are calling it this month, London’s Cinnamon Chasers has long been a name associated with some of the best synth music around. After he released his amazing début A Million Miles From Home in 2009 he came to most people attention with the massive Luv Deluxe (alongside a slick video from Francis Pollara who went on to direct Russ Chimes’ Midnight Club trilogy). Luv Deluxe was huge, and set the stage for Cinnamon Chasers second album, Science, which cemented Russ Davies reputation for emotional and beautiful synth music with all the groove of Nu-Disco and all the emotional resonance of Jean Michel-Jarre or Vangelis.

So here we are as Cinnamon Chasers is gearing up for the release of his third full length record later this month. Dreams & Machines its the logical next step for CC, it’s got that spacey, cosmic Disco feel alongside the blissful Balearic keys that so encapsulate Cinnamon Chasers sound, but here there’s an underlying current of early 90s House, a warehouse Rave feeling that pushed Davies’ music one step further. The album kicks off with the title track (which we heard a couple of months ago), and Dreams & Machines sums it, and the whole release, up nicely. The meeting of pounding Disco beats and hazy synths & vocoded vocals leys the groundwork for the rest of the record. As we go into Watch The World Burn we start to pick up on some of those House influences with a stabbing organ line set against the warping galactic synths. Throughout the album the tracks maintain that perfect balance of infectious dancefloor grooves and transcendent smokey synths. highlights, for us, have to include the 21st century BladeRunner Italo-Electro of Hyperwaves, Flash Gun’s introspective Vocoder-Pop and Retrocop, which consummately appeals to our love of Italo and B-Boy Electro, it’s an instant Boogie classic with a Piano House twist. Dreams & Machines is yet another almost flawless release from Cinnamon Chasers, the textbook album for lovers of either retro Disco music or synthesizer tunes in general. Not many capture the emotionality of electronic music without sacrificing and of it;s dancefloor dive, but Cinnamon Chasers has done it again.