by John Brouk
On Dimple’s newest record, Greg Hartunion and Colby Nathan exchange the atmospheric and space-filled experiments of their 2022 record Soul Chateau in favor of a dense, oozing fog of hushed melodies sung over grooving tempos. The cathartic and engulfing sonic sludge on Obscure Residue provides a calming-yet-eerie space to reflect on the effects of relationships and the passing of time. It’s like relaxing on a beanbag chair where you’re unsure what’s stuffed inside. Could be normal, or might be totally weird.
Obscure Residue is the third chapter in Dimples’ novel of freaky folk records for the Providence, Rhode Island-based label Ba Da Bing. It is a densely packed record with sustained loops, layers of synths, stringy guitar leads, and odd burbles accented by intermittent instrumentation from a violin here, a bari sax squonk there, and a plinky little synth riff that disappears before you recognize its arrival. The songs feel like they’re being played not by individual musicians, but by a music-producing mass that has absorbed all these different instrumental implements. It’s like if The Band was conjoined in some freak sci-fi experiment.
The album feels like a seek-and-find book of different musical parts. Did you find the wailing slide guitar? A bubbling synth arpeggio? The banjo riff? Two harmonized guitar leads? Was that a foghorn? Picking out individual instruments from the engulfing blob of sound is fun and surprising. Stringed instrument sinews act as ligaments allowing the songs to flex and breathe while staying connected. The rhythms ensure we aren’t left out in space, grounding the record with a shuffling groove that keeps things moving.
The entire record is narrated by tightly harmonized breathy vocals, adding to the feel that there is but one breathing organism making all these sounds. This homogenized amalgamation suits the lyrical content as well, as relational complications confront us and change, morph, grow, and fade, while others strengthen with that untraceable, unanswerable quandary that is time.
Entering into the tracklist via any song will produce the same effect, such is the consistency of the “residue.” Picking out individual songs isn’t easily done as the whole album feels like one giant work. This isn’t to say that the album is short on ideas, more that everything is arranged so well that even when things do slightly switch up, like the slow down on the spaced out “Muscular and Velvety,” or get a little extra groovy on the preceding track “Wave and Walk,” you still know exactly what album you’re listening to. The tracklist creeps through different songs, slowly revealing more of the mass we’re confronted with, presenting different angles and views of the same complex sonic puzzle.
The bubbling cauldron is calmed on album closer “Passage of Time,” which serves as a bookend to the passage of time theme introduced earlier in the album. The song showcases more folk, less freak. It’s a palate cleanser that contrasts the rest of the album in a way that shows the folky bone structure of the oozing creature we’ve just bore witness to. Obscure Residue is out now and forever, but maybe it always has been.