Johnny Marr has announced the release date for his Fever Dreams Pt 2 EP, which will be taken from his larger 16-track double-album release, Fever Dreams Pts 1-4.
Due December 17, the second four-track installment of Marr’s Fever Dreams collection follows the recently released Spirit Power and Soul, and will make up the effort’s second quarter ahead of the album’s full release earlier next year.
Accompanying the announcement of the release date are two new tracks – Tenement Time and Sensory Street – that will be joined by Lightning People and Hideaway Girl on the Fever Dreams Pt 2 tracklist.
Opting for his favored Fender Jaguar electric guitar over his bonkers nine-pickup Fender “Spirit” Stratocaster in the music video for Tenement Time, Marr is on top form with some gain-tinged rhythm work that precedes a simple-yet-effective solo filled with sweet bends and neat pentatonic work.
Of Tenement Time, Marr commented, “That’s the experience of growing up in the inner city as a little kid, running around being quite wild.
“This idea of, ‘Forever, forever is mine’ – it’s about running around Ardwick [Manchester, England], bunking into warehouses and getting chased,” he added. “That was the first time I was self-consciously into culture: around people who wore certain clothes, and it was part of being a little Manchester boy, really.
“I have a real romanticism about that period of my life.”
The second single is equally infectious, featuring some double-tracked fuzz-dipped and piercing clean guitar melodies, as well as a bounty of guitar-driven soundscapes and subtle double-stop embellishment licks.
Speaking of the “wildly diverse” Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 record as a whole, Marr teased that the album will tap into a sound he’s been honing in on ever since he left the Smiths, saying, “There are so many strands of music in it. We didn’t do that consciously, but I think I’ve got a vocabulary of sound.
“I feel very satisfied that I’ve been able to harness it,” he continued. “It’s an inspired record, and I couldn’t wait to get in and record every day.”
Marr dove deeper into the record while in conversation with NME, saying, “For me, the album and the whole experience has been expansive, ironically – at a time that’s been so much about seclusion. The ideas and the sound reflect that.
“It felt like a big undertaking, and I think it sounds like a big undertaking,” he continued, before revealing the sonic direction of Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 was influenced by a desire to create something more “energetic” than his previous effort, Call the Comet (2018).
“I wanted to come back from the last album with something extremely up-tempo. A little bit of me thinks that my peers and I are almost expected to coast along with mid-tempo, earnest rock music,” Marr mused. “I wasn’t at all feeling like putting my feet up and getting some slippers. That never occurred to me.”
