Dust Sculptures tours prog metal, GOAT gets tribal.
Dust Sculptures
Far Above The Pines
Available on Bandcamp
Dust Sculptures just released Far Above The Pines, a 55-minute tour of progressive metal that stops by shoegazing, post-rock, death and doom. Among all that heavy dissonance and distortion, Dust Sculptures occasionally steps back into memories of soundscapes and acoustics.
Far Above The Pines is a collision of genres, a unification of contrasts. It’s not an easy thing to do—to merge opposites—but Dust Sculptures has done it and given us an hour of a kind of progressive metal that we’ve never heard.
But just who the hell is Dust Sculptures? Well, they’re from Nashville, but they haven’t played any shows. They had already released one album before Far Above The Pines back in October of 2013. Turns out Dust Sculptures is actually a single person—Josh Marberry. This guy manages to be vocalist, guitarist, bassist, drummer and producer, all wrapped up in one tight package. And maybe that begins to explain the instrumental unity in Far Above The Pines, if supernatural musicianship and uncanny composition can count as adequate explanations.
It’s hard to explain how such an amazing album could have been “written, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Josh Marberry in a small bedroom between the summers of 2013 and 2014.” I mean, damn, one guy in a bedroom for one year produces this? Praise is all I have for him.
So go support this one-man band and buy Far Above The Pines on his Bandcamp. The best thing about the album is its accessibility. The album thrives on opposites, so even if you aren’t the person throwing up devil horns in the front row of a metal show, you’ll still love it.
Far Above The Pines steps toward the evolution of progressive metal—and keeps a foot planted behind in tribute to what came before it.
GOAT
Commune
Sub Pop (US/CAN)
S
ometimes I get so caught up in listening to local artists I forget there’s an unimaginably gigantic world of music out there just waiting for willing ears. So I decided to go swimming amid the sound waves, and found myself washed ashore in someplace faraway.
I stumbled across the beach and was greeted by many men in ritual masks and costumes. I asked where I was and they told me Korpilombolo, Sweden. They led me away to a village in the cold and sang and danced to something strange. I asked them, “What music is this?” They told me it was the music of the world.
Swedish band GOAT released their album titled Commune on Sept. 23. The album combines the essences of tribal, psychedelic, and rock-n-roll into something I’ve never heard before.
It feels like the soundtrack to a modern ritual, like we should dance in the dark around a fire and sing as the tribal drums are pounding the beat into your legs. The bass is swimming all around your ears while you shut your eyes, the voices are harmony yelling at the earth and sky.
But then the guitar hits you with some groovy lick that’s straight-up rock-n-roll. And suddenly the wah-wah pedals kick on and the bass picks up the beat and the percussion changes from tribal to drumset. Everything is that psychedelic rock straight from the ’70s.
Then the track changes. A woman echoes in your ear, “There is only one true meaning with love. And that is to be a positive force in the constant creation of evolution.” The album dives back into the tribal and strange.
This is GOAT and Commune—the interplay between psychedelic and tribal, modern and traditional, universe and individual. This is the music of the world.