Listen: Bonsai – “I Fashion You A Dreamer”

Think of it – a slab of salted, sea-foamed driftwood bobbing beneath a gauzy sun, when the air is just the right kind of moist and the breeze a perfect waft of refreshment. What we wouldn’t give to be that driftwood sometimes, huh?

Brooklyn, NY singer-songwriter Simone Stevens coos about “suffering from a malady called reality” on her latest single from her Bonsai project, “I Fashion You A Dreamer”. I dig her sentiment – I’m sat here in a cubicle, dress shirt, slacks, and shoes, and I could sure use a sick day from this ailment. Wading into Stevens’ kaleidoscopic world of country-inflected dream-pop filtered through a tropical lens is a helluva start anyway.

Stevens and company reach out with the magnetic caress of gleaming, churning dream-pop fizz to draw us into a subtropical setting constructed around an exotic and agile bassline that weaves its way through moody acoustic strums and around nimble, Spanish-flavoured picking. All this is then beautifully glazed with pedal-steel accents midway through courtesy of guitarist Greg McMullen. To her credit, Stevens’ window-pane clear, pitch-perfect vocals bear more than a passing resemblance to the incomparable Neko Case.

You can pick up Bonsai’s self-titled debut EP, funded on Kickstarter, on 27 May via the band’s website.