by Cole Makuch and Dylan Kiefer
A withered voice, barely discernible over the wicked down-tuned sludge of the house band, guides you toward a booth in the back. The band has not noticed, or have perhaps chosen to ignore, the venue’s empty stage, and have instead arranged their setup haphazardly around the bar where everyone’s smoking something, rendering the shape and size of the room indeterminate. “I’ve lost hold and become old and turned some dust to gold,” rasps the figure self-referentially when you find them, in time with the band. “And when you need it, I’ll make a scene.”
The scene, Together, is new slowcore: heavy, gritty, and more nuanced than its modest low-fidelity predecessors. In today’s musical landscape, recordings like those that first established the genre in the nineties— at the time resourcefully and innovatively capturing melancholy with slowed tempos and understated production techniques— are tired appropriation, and the three members of Duster are just too busy with their solo pursuits (Helvetia, Eiafuawn, Valium Aggelein, etc) to put energy to that. Only a pointed update to form is meaningful, which Duster achieves every time they emerge from hiatus with new material. While other founding groups in the slowcore movement ventured into ambient music, or disappeared, Duster has continued to reconstruct the genre from its gloomy blueprint in response to the scene of the day, creating fresh soundscapes that rest on time-tried foundations.
In the album’s first track, “New Directions,” both in title and in ethos, a cascading wall of fuzzed-out, alternately-tuned guitar and bass lumbers alongside a gargantuan drum kit, still crisp to the individual snare-wire as a reflection of the band’s growing embrace of higher-fidelity recording. The vocal performance is intense and caricatured, indicating from the get-go the group’s intent to explore new personas and emotions. In the following track, “Retrograde,” the intense strobe lights of the album opener dim to a faint neon glow, the drummer leaves the kit, and the band swims to the pulse of a programmed beat that percolates into the room. The band drifts in and out of aural resolution as the album progresses; they are at times articulate to the point where picks on strings are audible, and at times abstracted as if a thumb smeared the whole frequency spectrum with a dusty trail of rich harmonic overtones and vowel-y synths.
Here, Duster speaks clearly when it wants to, and at other times obscures itself behind walls of raw sound, to support matured songwriting abilities and the ambition to express emotions extending beyond ambiguous bittersweetness and lamentation. This flexibility gives the group the staying power that many others in the slowcore canon don’t have. Their past body of work is a series of Polaroid pictures of very specific times and sentiments that don’t need to be recreated. Together proves that Duster has many more things to say, and a powerful voice to say them all convincingly.