A M S

“Speechless”
Album review

On the down and out cusp of prior post-punk hardcore and the fruition of a three year concept comes the must-be-heard album Speechless in Sleepless Dreams by Keiko, better known as Orlando musical storyteller, Adam Matthew Smith. Among bedside angst staring at ceiling dwelled paper lanterns came the dream of hot air balloon back drops outlining the journey of two lovers torn with time. Self realizations hanging on black elms and learning deeply about another’s love affair, his solitude passes to insanity and horrific acts of destitutional romance. Adam’s prominent voice carries you on a journey of timeless love truths, the upbeat riffs and ambient sounds bob your head, unwavering in the sound, bringing emotional knives swaying and glistening until they become in tune with the response of understanding what everyone has been through and will, at some point, be going through – Love and the death of love; the love that was given and the love that was lost will beat in your head like a noir movie script, saying, ultimately – “Who overlooks what true love does find? Why are we not to survive? Please spare our lives.”

— Mark Dodds, Brink Mag

Speechless in Sleepless Dreams

Précis by Chantel Tattoli

Now that Malaina’s dead, he thinks often about how they were so good and then heartless to each other, alternate versions, white as the daylight prism, and as black as the center of eyes without sun or lightbulbs. How his tongue had waved in salute to her, and later, how it had flung such scalding words.

He shouldn’t have said half of it. She was alive then, he spoke to her face, or worse, in ways he can look up now, word for word. She was alive when he said it, but it seems like he was speaking ill of the dead. Somehow death has rendered Malaina innocent, and stock words like “sorry” and “guilt” have shed their banal skins, and he feels their skeletons pocking him, like he’s sleeping on hard objects lost in his covers. He is sorry; he is guilty. But there is no undo. If he died, maybe he could be found innocent too.