DHA
Dust, 2-album re-issue (Dust, Hard Attack) – A great, great, great album! WOW!!! The best undiscovered near-Black Sabbath band ever! Truly astounding… (sadly, the creepy blue-tinted band photo that appears on the cover is less good than Hard Attack’s depiction of a dwarf invasion).
I learned at some point that Dust had been Marky Ramone’s teenage band and put Hard Attack on my wish list. Well, I never did buy it, and then I found out that their two albums were being re-mastered and re-released on one CD. Bonus!! So I made buying that a priority. Wow, I’m glad I did – I’m listening to this nearly as much as the new Black Sabbath album 13!!
On first listen I found it a wee bit disappointing. It wasn’t quite as heavy as I expected, and was more Cream-influended than Sabbath-influenced (people always say that Sabbath invented heavy metal – I truly believe that if Sabbath hadn’t existed, our metal would all be Cream-based… yuck!!), although I did dig the wild bass inflections. It definitely got better as it went along, and the second album is definitely better than the first. The Dust sound is great. The drumming is pretty solid. The singing is good. The songwriting is cool. The albums are a bit inconsistent, especially the first one, with odd weird ballads, pop or country songs thrown in, as well as some hints of early Rush. It’s… a strange collection of songs. But now that it’s really grown on me I consider this compulsory listening. What a great band!!
The opening song “Pull Away/So Many Times” starts off mellow, and then launches into a cool psychedelic rocker, with wild, aggressive bass lines. I could listen to this song forever (weird backing vocals kick in near the end, though). “Walk in the Soft Rain” is a so-so folk guitar strummer that is a bit less interesting, while “Thusly Spoken” is a nasty, yucky pop ballad. Yes, these guys do lose their way a bit. They come back onto the path with “Learning To Die”, a nasty and brutal little tune. “All In All” is a bit silly-sounding, but it’s okay. “I Been Thinking” is a silly country song, that is happily also very short. “Ivory” is a fantastic rocker that is also short – short and sweet!! “How Many Horses” is quite country rock-ish, with a really terrible, drippy solo. Oh well… “Suicide”, the second-last song on the album, is probably the best they ever did, right up there with the long psychedelic rocker “From A Dry Camel” on the second album. “Suicide” also includes a totally amazing bass solo – love it!! Closing the first album is “Entrance” (ironic title, dude), a short acoustic ditty.
The second, eponomously-titled album Dust opens up with “Stone Woman”, with a pretty little whistle, then some groovy slide guitar and some cool bopping rock. Yeah! “Chasin’ Ladies” is a great funky blues number with a great burbing bassline, and a cool echoey vocal line. We need more songs like this. “Goin’ Easy” is a true blues song, with some very nice slide guitar. “Love Me Hard” is a wicked rocker that drills on and on with great power drumming and groovy basslines. “From A Dry Camel” is a monster of a song, starting off with huge gong sounds, then some solo bass trudging away, the song really only picks up over one minute in, then three minutes in it picks up pace and becomes an incredible, psychedelic rock-out, and the last two minutes are kind of like the first two. A true masterpiece of sludge.
“Often Shadows Fall” is a very pretty, gloomy number. “Loose Goose” is an instrumental that ends off the album (and this set), just as the first album had an instrumental final song, but in this case the song bops and rocks and is effectively a fully-formed song waiting for lyrics.
The CD comes with a cool little booklet too, man, containing pictures of the band, and short blurbs from the three band members, as well as their manager, Kenny Kerner, who went on to produce KISS.