ANNE - Dream Punx LP (Pink Vinyl)

Portland, Oregon's ANNE garnered flashes of buzz with their 2010 demo and Mixtape One, but praise is most certainly deserved for Dream Punx, which plucks a couple songs from those releases and adds new jams that are even better. Ostensibly, you could call ANNE a shoegaze band. But that almost discredits their sound in a way, because they take so many measures from the darker eras of the alternative canon that they're really a sprawling and diverse band that could fit in at any point on the timeline. With West Coast acts like Deafheaven and Whirr contributing to a thrilling shoegaze makeover of sorts, Dream Punx solidifies ANNE's place in this revival and reinvention, and it's going to be exciting to see where they help take it.