Nightlands is the recording project of Philadelphia-based multi-instrumentalist Dave Hartley. The music he creates in his bedroom is itself a bed of delicate, chiming strings and bubbling synths beneath a blanket of choral vocal arrangements. It's dreamy in the literal sense. "Forget the Mantra" is, in essence, a field recording of Hartley's dreams - a travel journal through pop music and a collection of psych-hymns. The songs sound both huge and intimate, breathy and cavernous like massive echoes of a faraway concert. Influences are The Beach Boys, The Traveling Wilburys and Hawkwind. Side A pulses with layers of tom tom drums on wide-open standout slow jam "300 Clouds" and nimbly-picked acousticmelodies on "Suzerain (A Letter to the Judge)," like Crosby, Stills & Nash gone comsic-kraut. The songs roll and gallop then stop to breathe, always exhaling with what sounds like a thousand voices. Through its experimental back half - reminiscent of Bowie's Low or Kate Bush's "The Ninth Wave" from Hounds of Love - full of vocal samples from Hartley's real life, the more pop-leaning front end is given greater context, like a close study of a plant's blossom before traveling down through its root architecture. "There are degrees of warmth...and Philadelphia musician Dave Hartley's Nightlands project sounds like it was recorded in a hearth...Hartley's music seeps out and fills spaces, combining the kind of expansive resonance found in Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs with Beach Boys-like vocal arrangements..." - Pitchfork