Alabama Shakes – ‘I Must Be Dreaming’ review: protest music without the bite

The comeback album is fraught with pitfalls.

Often, when a band takes a long break and finally returns with a new record, the result is overcooked and overthought, bearing all the signs of its protracted birth.

This isn’t an allegation you could level at ‘I Must Be Dreaming’, Alabama Shakes ’ first album in over a decade.

As its name suggests, this is a laidback, dreamy collection of psychedelic-soul-influenced songs, though there are two sides to its subject matter.

READ MORE: For Quiet Light, duality is a fact of life: “Everything is way more connected than we think” On the one hand, it’s a protest against America’s Trump-directed fall from grace, with the trio asking: can this actually be real? On the other, it’s a punch-drunk paean to life itself – the ethereal ‘Easy’ finds singer Brittany Howard expressing delighted disbelief that her relationship with her fiancée could be so fulfilling and secure.

The tension at the heart of this record is its defining feature, as the Shakes explore the contradiction between domestic bliss and the nightmarish political climate that rages outside the front door of the proverbial happy home.

The band’s music hasn’t always been this complicated.

Their wildly successful first two albums, 2012’s ‘Boys & Girls’ and 2015’s ‘Sound & Color’, traded on a retro sound that was just conservative enough for a mainstream rock audience.

When the latter record shot to the top of the Billboard 200 and picked up four Grammys, it seemed they could do anything.

Well, they chose to do… nothing.

Howard recently told the Guardian that their hiatus was a matter of self-preservation in the face of burnout: “We were in danger of running the thing into the ground.” Perhaps her barnstorming, psychedelic 2024 solo album ‘What Now’ was a circuit breaker for the band’s creative torpor. ‘I Must Be Dreaming’ certainly continues in its gently experimental vein, though the group – completed by guitarist Heath Fogg and bassist Zac Cockrell – make sure that they fuse their gauzy psychedelia with the hookiness of old (see the funky, celebratory ‘How Love’s Supposed To Go’).

It’s obvious why ‘I Feel Hope Coming’, a drop-dead gorgeous ode to optimism, was chosen as a pre-release single.

If anything, though, ‘I Must Be Dreaming’ is a little too understated and easy on the ear. ‘American Dream’, a lament for the corruption that has gripped the Land Of The Free, simply sails by when it should hit like a Molotov cocktail.

It’s to their credit that the Shakes have tried something new, but such chilled-out sounds aren’t necessarily the best vehicle for much-needed political protest.