Duster

1996年に結成され、約4年という短い活動期間で終了したUSカリフォルニアのスロウコア/スペース・ロック・バンド、DUSTER。2019年にリリースされた約20年ぶりの3RDスタジオ・アルバム『DUSTER』がカセットテープ・リイシュー!

バンド・メンバー、CLAY PARTONのガレージ(通称:LOW EARTH ORBIT)でレコーディングされたアルバムで、硬質なベースライン、シャープなギター、そして憂いを帯びたリリックと、DUSTERの魅力が全て備わった復活作となっています!

After the release of the career-spanning box set Capsule Losing Contact, which rounded up their surprisingly influential and popular 90s recordings, the San Jose trio Duster could have faded back into the slowcore abyss, satisfied in knowing that their indelible sound had stood the test of time and had spread across a wider audience than ever before. They had other plans, though, and as the set was being readied, they were back in bandmember Clay Partons garage working on new music. As they used to do, the group recorded live to tape while taking their sweet time to carefully build tracks out of space, fuzz, and restraint. The result is an album that stands on equal footing with their seminal recordings, while adding even more gloomy melody and downcast dynamics. The band resisted any urges to clean up their sound, and instead Duster is their grittiest, most defiantly lo-fi recording. Conjuring magic out of the scraping noise, staticky silence, buried vocals, and muffled drums, they tell stories of isolation, melancholy, and bummer times without resorting to raising their voices or jacking up the tempos. Thats not to say they lack intensity; the opening double gut punch of the harshly repetitive Copernicus Crater and blown-out, distortion-caked dirge Im Lost is Duster at their most direct and present. It starts the album off with a warning: this isnt some cuddly reunion, its a serious album thats going to take some chances. The rest of the record delves into similarly guitar-heavy territory on the almost up-tempo Summer War, tunes in some AM radio tinny shoegaze on Ghost World, sinks deeply into morosely hooky songcraft on Hoya Paranoia and The Thirteen, dials back the guitars to let space and warmth flood into the sad chord changes (Chocolate and Mint and the breathtakingly lovely Lomo) -- and, perhaps most impressively of all, the trio arent afraid to fool around with the formula. They display a strong experimental streak throughout the record, especially on the drum machine (over)-driven Damaged, which sounds like the Aphex Twin playing the Bedhead catalog, and the happily meandering, almost falling apart after every drum beat or guitar strum Hoya Paranoia. And they abandon tempo altogether on Go Back, a song built on massive waves of guitar noise, piercing klaxons of guitar, and a yearning, almost naked vocal. These tracks show that Duster didnt get back together just to take a nostalgia trip; they wanted to make new, quietly exciting music that pushes the outer limits of the groups sound in order to reach new destinations. Its still Duster to the core -- as sad, exhilarating, and powerful as ever -- but its colored by 20 years of life experience and dipped even more deeply in melancholy. At a time when almost every band ever has reunited to make disappointing, derivative music, Duster have come back to make their most sonically challenging and emotionally invested record yet. ~ Tim Sendra