“Aw, man, whatever happened to real music?” Seems like a question reserved for Grateful Dead-ish burnouts. But in this age of overstylized, über-digital, hipsterfied, electrocorpse nonsense music (always wanted to start a sentence with that), there does seem to be a genuine dearth of heartfelt, organically played tunes in the world. A band can get mad blog hype, a track of theirs might end up tucked away in a page of Rolling Stone next to a Megan Fox photo spread, and then they’ll fade into the abyss, a buzzband no longer. Ever clicked around in the Flavor Graveyard on the Ben & Jerry’s website? Imagine something like that for dearly departed indie bands.
There have been hints of musical earnestness in recent memory; Arcade Fire released The Suburbs, with a much-needed dose of Win Butler’s melodic, yelping pleas for the future, and Sufjan Stevens and Belle & Sebastian have come out with some similarly beautiful material. If indie music follows the economic principle of supply and demand, then Dust On The Breakers’ new release American Reclamation continues to fulfill the need for more “real” music, however shoddy the concept of “real” music might be. DOTB formed in 2006 at South by Southwest, with core members Jeff Linsenmaler (of the Czars), Jeff Davenport (of d.biddle) and Tim Husmann (of Crooked Fingers) coming together to form a loose collective that plays together occasionally à la Broken Social Scene.
Apparently, sometimes the loosest definition of a band ends up producing the most complete, fully fleshed-out music, given American Reclamation sounds like a brief, solid effort of a band that has been together for a long time. The sound is half-acoustic, half-electric, with bursts of keyboard, organ, trumpets, big drums and implausibly beautiful harmonies. It’s 25 minutes of music that is neither sopping with melodrama nor absent of feeling altogether. Martin Feveyear deserves big ups for the production, which sounds sweet but not cloying, emotional but not emo. Also responsible for the great vibe is singer Anna Slade, whose vocals make the otherwise good songs great. The EP opens with “Charred Metropolis”, a haunted, chugging ballad extremely reminiscent of Arcade Fire. “It’ll end in pieces”, intones Linsenmaler, a very capable vocalist in his own right. “I was so young and so naïve/I thought I would try”, Linsenmaler and Slade sing together, and then the violins kick in, and damn. It’s good! It’s powerful! What else is there to say? “Quiet Please” starts with great-sounding snares and dissolves into an extended, cloudy piano-and-guitar coda. “Quiet Please (redux)” slows down the tempo further, brings in some lovely Beatle-y pianos and vocal harmonies, then the ringing pianos stop abruptly into uneasy silence.
The two real standouts are “Frontiers” and the closer. “There are no more frontiers/There are no frontiers left” are the eerie first lines of the former track; the song switches from this eerie slow refrain to an acoustic-strummed Fleetwood Mac-style harmonized bridge, until Slade carries the song to its electric-keyboard conclusion. The closing track, “Summer Rainstorms”, is a ¾ waltz that breaks into pure, brass-accented buoyancy, as Linsenmaler sings, “We’ll run in the rain/Catch up to me.” At their best, DOTB are more than proficient at experimenting with atmosphere, instrumentation, dynamics, and song content. It’s not hard to feel good, or better, or somehow just more aware of everything after listening to the EP. The only need left unfulfilled at the end of American Reclamation is the need to hear more - hopefully a full-length album will be up next.
Track List:
1. Charred Metropolis
2. Frontiers
3. Quiet Please
4. Quiet Please (redux)
5. Summer Rainstorms
