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Heat Dust

Heat Dust EP

Written by: BV on 22/01/2013 19:46:04

Heat Dust is a name I absolutely hadn’t heard before. Nevertheless, it became quite apparent to me, that I had to call dibs on reviewing this album as it supposedly sounded like a mash-up of my grungy, noise-rock like teenage years. – Boy do I miss them some times. So, essentially Heat Dust do in fact play a mash-up of Bleach-era Nirvana, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. just to name a few of their apparent influences. Sound-wise the album is filled with the more or less mandatory buzz-saw fuzzy guitar riffs, pounding bass lines, and fast-as-fuck drumming – topping it all off with a set of more or less drowned vocals, as the mix of the instruments seem to dominate the soundscape in a far larger degree than the vocals. But I’ll get to that later.

The 5-track EP opens with the fast-paced ramblings of the song “Sleeping Call”. Sleeping Call is effectively the prime example of a mix, wherein the vocals drown under the sheer murkiness of three instrumentalists struggling to be heard equally. While the track offers fuzzy guitar lines in the style of the earlier mentioned, presumed inspiration sources, it has little new to bring to the table in terms of songwriting. Melodically it is based on every old rule in the book of semi-grungy track-creation. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter to me because I end up digging it anyway – I can’t really help myself. So to the credit of Heat dust, they may not be groundbreaking artists or anything like that, but they do write fascinatingly catchy songs. And to be fair, the music game isn’t really about being groundbreaking anymore, when nearly too much has already been done before.

Anyway, the overall soundscape and songwriting of Sleeping Call more or less sets the standard for the rest of the EP. The songs are generally fast-paced, filled with fuzzy guitars waiting to generate massive feedback at every break, pounding bass and drums that drive the whole murky mess forwards in a gruesomely insistent way. The murkiness of the sound is, however, one of my primary concerns with this EP. While I presume that most readers will agree with me, on the fact that grunge/noise-rock records are meant to be kind of murky sounding, I do tend to find this album a bit too much at all fronts. I feel like Heat Dust generally know what they’re doing, but that they should, perhaps, put in some extra thought on the matter of the vocals, because to me, vocals are meant to be audible. Not necessarily pristine sounding or anything like that, but definitely more audible than they are on this EP.

All in all, I must say that it is an admirable first release from Heat Dust, and I am looking forward to hearing how they will evolve over time.

Download: Sleeping Call, Priority Mail For An Asshole
For The Fans Of: Sonic Youth, Bleach-era Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr.
Listen: facebook.com

Release Date ??.12.2011
Texas Is Funny Records (Bear Trap)