Listening to Nom De Plume’s new album, Circle the Dream, is like finding an old, intricate map for a place that doesn’t exist on any globe. This is a record for the motionless traveler, the soul pacing the perimeter of its own skull. Aris Karabelas and Michael Magee have crafted a landscape not of highways and canyons, but of the vast, contradictory terrain behind the eyes, where the greatest distances are covered by simply standing still.
The journey here is fraught. Karabelas’s voice carries the weary texture of someone who has argued with his own shadow and lost, yet still shows up for the next round. It’s an album that understands exhaustion as a fuel source. At one point, a particular guitar line hangs in the air with the strange hum of a neon sign advertising a diner that was demolished twenty years ago—a ghost of a glow, promising a warmth that is now just a memory. It’s in moments like these that the external world, with its frantic routines and hollow ambitions, dissolves into the “fever dream” the album’s narrative so acutely observes.
This music doesn’t offer easy answers. It prods at the quiet shame of inaction and the dissonant chords of self-doubt, exploring what it means to be a lonely spectator to both the world’s madness and your own. The progressive, country-tinged arrangements coil and uncoil, building a space where resilience and resignation can share a bottle of bourbon without coming to blows.
By the end, you’re not sure if you’ve been given a guide to find home, or if you’ve just been shown the intricate patterns on the locks.
