Review Summary: Is there really nothing new under the sun?
Music is a complex, ever evolving scene, juggling at any given time dozens of bleeding edges like a neurosurgeon who got his PhD from a literal clown college. It's a scene almost too big for the word "music" itself. Considering the rapid pace of experimentation and advancement it would be almost a given to assume that the scene is too busy with present to recall the past. Is it not the consummate enthusiast's lament that there's nowhere near enough hours to enjoy all today's great music, nevermind yesterday's? And yet nothing could be further from the truth; fans of music have an elephantine memory, longer and deeper than that of almost any other hobby. Indeed, is there any other that fetishizes the obscure so much as ours? If I had a quarter for every time I was recommended an LP by someone long dead, I could probably retire right now, and I'm not even a professional! Of course if you're on sputnik, this is probably all review to you.
That little digression is my circuitous way of CYA because, while I've never encountered anything even remotely like Angels Dust, and I'm reasonably certain that you, dear reader, haven't either, I'm 100% certain that someone will immediately chime in with a dozen word salad album names by artists that already thoroughly covered this ground a half-century ago. As a reviewer I have to admit it's a strange and rather disconcerting place to be. I can at least take solace in the one thing I can confidently proclaim: the Slow Tapes demand to be heard.
I'm going to make a bold claim: in music, first impressions are everything. As I mentioned previously, time is an especially valuable commodity when it comes to sampling music, and if you withhold your best moments for somewhere in the mid-album doldrums most listeners won't stick around to hear them. Angels Dust recognizes the importance of putting its best―or in this case most striking foot forward. If you'll indulge me a moment, have a long gander at that album cover and take a stab at what that might be. If you right-click and hit "View Image" you can get a full-res shot.
If your guess was "funeral dirge organ", congratulations! Your intuition and tracklist reading skills are to be commended. In various summaries Angels Dust and the Hit+Run love the descriptor "haunting", and nowhere is it more apropos. The pipe organs call to mind an intense, nearly palpable catholic cathedral setting while the listener is left to dwell on the image just long enough to wonder where this is going before Psychopop's percussion cuts in. I'm pretty sure it's percussion anyway, but I can't quite be certain as it's yet another thing I've never quite heard before. A lot of auditory cherries getting popped today. This is to percussion as long exposure is to photography; whereas conventional percussion tends to emphasize the "snap" of each strike, the intent here seems to be just the opposite. Layers of echoes combine together to create a percussion that sounds held like a chord on a string instrument. And it's all so...distant, like a half-remembered tune glimpsed through a porthole in the rain of a particularly foggy day, layers of artifice. A copy of a copy of a copy.
But then like a razor Flavia cuts through the drone of gothic denpa to offer her meditations in an echoed tune not quite alive, not quite undead. The razor is sharp enough to even briefly cut short the oppresive percussion. "The days go by, so slowly. But I lie, it passes so fast." Just enough distortion to let the mind wander. By the time the percussion returned I was hooked, and I'd be surprised if you're not as well. In the span of about a minute-and-a-half, Angels Dust has perfectly encapsulated themselves, the Slow Tapes, their message. It's so exacting and precise in its execution I can't help but wonder if "Funeral", if not all the Slow Tapes, are the tape they've been wanting to make their whole lives. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry famously mused that "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "perfection", but it's a hell of an achievement for two instruments and a little production, three if you include Flavia's voice.
Let me repeat that "Funeral" perfectly encapsulates the Slow Tapes. There's no really reason to dwell on the rest of the record because while it's certainly sterling, as I said in the last paragraph "Funeral" says everything there is to be said. Flavia muses cryptically on different subjects and other half Psychopop experiments with different beats, but it's all fundamentally the same territory. If you love "Funeral" as I did, you'll love the rest of the EP just as much. If you don't, you won't. The only exception is an oddball closer, a remix of the immediately prior track. It's quite an odd choice and one that tonally contrasts with the rest of an otherwise laser focused EP. I don't know quite what to make of it, but feel compelled to hate it just for standing in such stark contrast to the sounds that preceded it. It's not a bad piece at all, but I wish they'd left it exclusively on the "Musings" compilation.
It's an (admittedly fitting) tragedy that Angels Dust's haunting sound seems to have faded into the background. Perhaps one day they'll get their due. I'd hate to imagine "Funeral" as not just an overture, but also an epitaph.
