Together
The San Jose slowcore trio formed in 1996 and disappeared five years later, leaving behind a legacy of depressive, dissociative lo-fi rock the band’s since described as sounding like “desperate, purring distress.” Then, nearly 20 years later, Duster returned, as if they’d woken up from a long nap into a world that was even more of a bummer than they’d left it. That signature sense of looking at life as if from outside of it persists on the band’s second album since their 2019 return, as they sing about ghosts and shadows and lost memories over guitars that fuzz out into distorted oblivion. But there’s also a newfound coziness to their arrangements, and a sense that even if we live in hell, at least we’re in hell together. As they sing on the bittersweet “New Directions”: “I’ve lost touch, I’ve said too much, been opposites and such/But I’ll take care of all of us.”
Gather your loved ones, Together is here. Duster’s fourth album is a 13-song exploration of comfortable, interplanetary goth. A sonic vaseline of submerged guitars, solder-burned synths, and over-driven rhythm tracks. “I know people say, ‘Oh Duster music so sad, we've even said it ourselves before,” Clay Parton said. “But it's a lot more like absurdism than nihilism.”
The trio’s second album post-hiatus matches the clarity of its arrangements with an unexpected spiritual lightness. Rarely has Duster sounded so pleasant and peaceful.
Duster's self-titled 2019 album was a welcome return for the slowcore spacegaze survivors, recapturing the lo-fi beauty of their earlier recordings while also adding some abrasive noise and even more gloom.