Review Summary: Sometimes the ebbs and flows can be a bit too minimalist...
Ambient and/or drone music has an incredible way of evoking emotion from the listener despite being extremely minimal 95% of the time. To be honest, that’s one of the biggest reasons why it has become one of my favorite genres of all time. It’s usually no more than simple synth work mixed with some type of monotonous riffs from an electric guitar, field recordings of things such as wind and other natural elements or long droning sections that could lull an unsuspecting listener into a deep daze. Sometimes that can be an advantage and sometimes it can be a detriment. And sometimes it can be somewhere in between. That’s where Alexander Gregory Kent’s debut solo album
Teaches Dust to Reason fits into the genre.
This guy came from the noise rock outfit Sprain and while I’m not at all familiar with their music, their demise opened the door for Alexander to explore a solo career and its kind of….incomplete after the release of this album.
Teaches Dust to Reason is an album that consists of only 2 tracks yet it runs for almost an hour, clocking in at just over 55 minutes. Sounds like an ambient album huh? The title track starts with a long, droning riff that would remind you of something from an early Boris album. The reverb smacks you in the mouth right from the get-go and gives you a feel for what you’re in for. Both tracks are grueling mixtures of monotonous synths and minimal sound collages ranging from melancholic post rock buildups and long winded folk sections all with that ambiance hovering in the background. These features all SOUND like the ingredients to cook up a well constructed ambient/drone album right?
Well that’s partially right. My biggest gripe with this album is that many of these sections just go on for far too long and might make the average ambient listener fall asleep. Yes, long winded passages of a lot of nothing are common in this type of music, but man, sometimes you have to know when to call it quits and add some type of flare to an already minimalistic way of making music. Some of my personal favorite ambient albums invoke feelings of dread (see Grouper’s
Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill) or feelings of being trapped underwater (see Biosphere’s
Substrata), or hell even feelings of being in space (hello Steven Roach’s
Structures from Silence)....but Alexander Gregory Kent has too many hit and miss moments here. For every hard hitting, trance inducing passage you have long sections of nothing. 15-20 minutes could’ve been cut from this album and it would’ve been way more impactful. You have to know when enough is enough and Alexander seems to still be finding that balance.
He’s definitely on the right track. And while
Teaches Dust to Reason has some nice moments, it’s ultimately a bit TOO minimalistic at points for me to claim it as a great ambient album. There’s times where you’ll be blown away (see the incredible organ work about 18.5 minutes into the second track Horse Goes to Heaven), but those moments are few and far between here. As a debut album, it’s certainly a stepping stone into what Alexander Gregory Kent can do. If anything it can be decent background music. But he certainly has a way to go if he wants to create a classic ambient album such as the albums I name dropped earlier in the review.
