Dummy offer up a pastel-hued escape fantasy on do you love the color of the sky?

In the prologue to David Toop’s excellent 1995 book Ocean Of Sound; a freewheeling history of ambient music, the author comes up with a doozy of a sentence: “as the world has moved towards becoming an information ocean, so music has become immersive. Listeners float in that ocean; musicians have become virtual travellers.” Toop was attempting to capture the mood of the fluid and globalised postmodern era in which he was writing. It feels apt, however, to use this same sentence with regard to Dummy, a band whose oeuvre so far feels like both an homage to and a subversion of this era of music.

Perhaps the best lens through which to view the LA-based band's fourth album do you love the color of the sky? is a ‘what if’-style thought experiment. These ten vibrant, impressionistic tracks imagine an alternative present, using the post-rock of Seefeel, the liquid d&b of LTJ Bukem, and the chillout pop of Morcheeba as the meeting point from which its timeline branches off. The album’s raw materials are strictly of this era: drum machines, swirling synths, ethereal vocals. However, Dummy do a compelling job of bending this mood-scape to suit their own ambitions, crafting a dreamlike middle ground somewhere in-between retro and futuristic.

This lost-in-time palette works because of the clear sense of fun that Dummy seem to be having. They’ve treated this combination of sonic signifiers as a sandbox in which to play around in, pulling at its seams and colouring in around the margins. "Full Spectrum Dominance" is like Stereolab remixed by Lemon Jelly, all killer grooves and injections of strange guitar distortion, while "Song of Mana" sounds like the strangest PlayStation One soundtrack you’ve (n)ever heard, with gently angular synths and inviting yet cryptic vocals.

The band’s most original feat – their sharpest means of deconstructing their already-deconstructed influences – is do you love the color of the sky?’s structural nous. You can almost visualise the shape of these tracks, in spite of the haze-like, candyfloss coloured textures conjured by the lava lamp guitars and bean bag-comfy synths. The dense "N of 1" is an oneiric groove monster; a heavenly indie dancefloor slammer that rides a single beat to a sticky floored otherworld. Then there’s restrained closer (and album highlight) "Heaven’s What You Make It", which opens and closes like a portal, or some kind of dream-pop tunnel, welcoming us in with reversed synths and reverberating beats.

Once you adjust yourself to its eccentricities, do you love the color of the sky? is extremely endearing. It's a softly-lit and pastel-hued otherland easy to get lost in, while its retrofuturistic, escape fantasy construction adds an extra layer of fascination. Look away if you want innovation or art that reflects the world today. But perhaps Dummy’s attempt to chart a different course – a better timeline – is itself a mirror of our current anxieties.