| On Dust,
these melodies hit their target. Again and again and again. It is a self-contained
world: I haven’t heard an album trying for a sound quite like this
in some time, outside of some of the ambient stuff I’ve been enjoying
lately, and those guys are aiming for an entirely different and usually
less complex mood. Murphy’s great strength is that even when he’s
writing an eight-minute epic (as he is rather often here: the shortest song
on the album runs to 6:35), he never loses sight of the endless matrix that
gave his craft birth: pop songs, I mean. Buried within the twinkling uds
and droning digeridoos, there are invariably short sharp little pop songs
trying to hide themselves amidst the richness of the tapestry. Which is
a neat trick, and one that nobody seems up for any more. David Sylvian is
one possibly useful point of comparison, as is Bryan Ferry, though Sylvian’s
breezier and Ferry’s poppier and ultimately deeper. I’m not
going to spend a lot of time explicating the album, because it truly is
one of the best albums I’ve heard all year, and has all the earmarks
of a keeper: songs that require close attention but are also pleasant to
just have running while one dances frantically around the kitchen; an heroic
vocal performance that doesn’t care if you call it “pretentious”
because if you let down your guard for even a minute it’ll have you
by the hair on the scruff of your neck; a depth of production that indicates
the great degree of care, attention, and love that obviously went into the
making of this record. There’s one extremely unfortunate song title
(“Girlchild Aglow”: what the hell was he thinking?) and the
lyrics are predictably heavy-handed at times, but aside from these minor
quibbles I am utterly stricken by Dust. What can I tell you? It’s
got nine songs, it runs for over an hour, and when I play it loud in the
living room it takes possession of the entire house and fills the place
with deep, lushly woven strains of melody and rhythm. Other once-relevant
artists should be so lucky as to wash up this beautifully. It’s wonderful,
and it beats running into Murphy working retail down at the North Grand
Mall. |