by John Brouk
The St. Louis-based, grungy dreampop group Algae Dust are back with the follow-up to their 2023 album In Hindsight. This continues the band’s biennial album cycle that started with their debut album split with Hennen in 2021. Rearranging, out now via Sad Cactus, is a collection of insightful guitar-laden pop songs with somberly poetic lyricism. Rearranging could easily refer to sorting through the intricacies of relationships and roles in both social and intimate settings.
Different combinations within the tracklist’s sonic palette create an environment where the twee rhythmic acoustic guitars and a cute little organ exist alongside the distorted, gazy guitar riffs and corresponding feedback. The violin can be heard accompanying the guitar on “Slipping,” “Gone Again,” and “How This Works.”
Even within individual songs, there are variances that add to the album’s feelings of duality and uncertainty, like on “Gone Again,” which accelerates/de-accelerates back-and-forth between a soft bed of guitar notes with chime-like keys and more energetic, uptempo riffs and violin that mirrors the vocal melody. This voice meditates on the questionable authenticity of someone who may not acknowledge their true self and may be prone to holding back their true feelings to fit in within different groups of individuals. The sporadic lifting and lowering of the gas pedal is revisited on “Five Years,” which similarly begins benignly and sweetly before escalating into driving rhythm of guitars and vocal harmonies in a full on frenzy of fuzzed-out guitars.
The album is scattered with thought-provoking lyrical combinations of the observational and cerebral. “Filling Station” describes a pile consisting of a “whole month worth of shoes, scattered round in every room,” and reaches for the reassurance that there is “comfort in chaos” and that “there’s nothing bad about doing nothing.” In nearly the same breath, there is a nagging fear that without the right balance of nothingness and activity, the chaos may become overwhelming. This descent into concern and terror is foreshadowed in the transition from energetic guitar strums and music box keys to a minor key synth + bass breakdown. The song eventually reaches its sinister conclusion with soaring vocal harmonies that intertwine over dark guitar bends and a ghostly synth solo. Forlorn relations are placed under a microscope on “Everything That’s True” in an analysis of the all-compassing feeling of pain and the struggle of putting feelings into words.
Alt rock aesthetics are further explored on “Wedge” and “Sheets” through the latter’s stew of grunge-tinged guitars and disorienting “from all sides” vocals and gnarled riffs, ascendent piano, and bashing cymbals. The former track joins these rocking sensibilities with a psychedelic descending chord progression that reflects the sensation of not matching others’ expectations. The jauntier, more angular arrangement of the verses on “If I Wanted” keeps the latter end of the tracklist interesting with a waltzy dance of lead vocals and guitars that explodes into an anthemic, slowed refrain of the chorus.
Rearranging is an album of growth, gains, and loss, looking deep into the internal effects of one’s relations and environment. It’s forlorn, and yet there are hints of optimism in the melancholia. The “twee gaze” balance between the sweet and the sinister is impressive and could express frustration just as thoroughly as sadness.