Dusk – Glass Pastures
You gotta love it when a band from a midwestern town you’ve never heard of — in this case, Appleton, Wisconsin — suddenly shows up on the scene (or at least, YOUR scene) with a fresh, winning sound that incorporates influences from many of your longtime favs — such as Commander Cody, the Jayhawks, NRBQ, and the Flying Burrito Brothers — on a stylistically wide ranging yet focused, tightly-played yet playfully loose album that charms the heck out of you, seemingly (as they say) from out of nowhere.
That hasn’t happened to me since I encountered the Irish band The Thrills in the mid-2000s, when their debut delivered a convincingly authentic-sounding version of Beach Boys surf rock from their home-base in Dublin. Though not quite as unexpected as that album, Dusk’s sophomore album Glass Pastures, released October 20 by punk- leaning New Jersey label Don Giovanni, provides a bracing wake-up call from the heart of American music. And it does so by artfully combining many tried and true elements of Americana / alt country / roots rock in just the right measures, injecting some unexpected freshness into that constantly shape-shifting yet still readily recognizable genre.
Recorded and mixed by the band at their mid-century house turned recording studio Crutch of Memory, Glass Pastures has a clean, professional sound that highlights the band’s happy-ensemble chemistry, so that at times the playing almost sounds live. The first track, “Pissing in a Wishing Well,” provides a prime example. A rousing roadhouse- style rocker, “Pissing” shows off all of Dusk’s tricks and tools, with Ryley Crowe’s pedal steel whining over trill-laden 70s rock ‘n’ roll licks while the rhythm section provides a solid bed for drummer Amos Pitsch’s pleasantly biting vocals.
Other highlights include “At the Roadside,” a honky-tonk romp reminiscent of Commander Cody & the Lost Planet Airmen’s “Truck Stop Rock”; the slow-rolling barroom ballad “Organized Crime,” which wittily embraces good, clean midwestern fun — the first verse mentions “wasting the hours / like livestock on a hillside” — over less salubrious types of recreation involving things like crowded rooms and money clips; and the light-hearted “Incredible Edible Egg,” which deploys such memorably mysterious lines as “Oh, I hold back the fire in the water / I’m wishin’ for more than this shit” — along with consecutive snazzy solos by Crowe (pedal steel) and guitarist Tyler Ditter.
The wind chimes-backed revenge rocker “Don’t Let Them Tell You” leaves a mark thanks to its nimble blend of blues-rock and country stylings, lyrics like “Well the priest wants your money / The pigs want your weed / They smoke up every little bit / Except for the seeds,” and dueling guitar licks provided by Ditter and Bill Grasley.
The album’s plaintive closer “Be Nice to Me All Day Long” is the highlight for me, though, with Julia Blair providing a beautifully affecting vocal performance. Notably, the album’s lead vocals are distributed amongst everyone in the band, as are the songwriting duties, which are handled capably by Pitsch, Crowe, Blair, Ditter and bassist Ridley Tankersley. Clearly Dusk has plenty of talent to go around.
My only complaint is that the lyrical content gets a bit clunky at times. In the case of the otherwise catchy “Changes,” the lyrics are unseasoned. (An example: “Try and take as much as I can / From who I was, to what I am / Some things are best to be left / Making room for that which will help.”) Also, while the singing is mostly solid, at times the phrasing could be a bit more artful and compelling. The male vocalists don’t exactly milk each syllable for multivalent nuances of meaning and emotion (like, say, fellow midwesterner Bob Dylan does) — though to be fair their direct and generally uncomplicated lyrics rarely call for that.
More importantly, Dusk doesn’t really push the envelope of its chosen genre here sometimes; they seem quite content rather to stay nice and comfy in its pocket. The tune “Gold Blue and Grey,” for example, seems a bit too familiar, like an early Jayhawks ballad that didn’t quite make the cut for Tomorrow the Green Grass. In this case the country-rock formula seems like an old, heavily worn armchair: fine if you picked it up for free by the roadside, but a bit too threadbare and out of style — oy, that yucky green velvet! — for the long haul.
That’s probably just me quibbling, and I’ll admit that on repeated listenings this paean to getting stoned in the afternoon began to grow on me (though I still tend to go for the Next button when the predictable big key change hits at 5:20 and the tune then goes on for another 1:49). But consider a couple of counter-examples from the album. To my ears the self-referencing “Dusk” succeeds better at tweaking that Jayhawks formula, with its observant lyrics (“An old man, sittin’ in a corner booth / Cherishing the way things used to be / A truck driver eating dinner all alone / Watching TV on her phone — she likes it that way”), Tankersley’s bouncy bass riff, Ditter’s tasty lead guitar solo, and layered choral harmonies crescendoing at just the right time.
Similarly, “Be Nice to Me All Day Long” skirts the too-formulaic by way of its quirkily sardonic lyrics — including lines like “We’ve been slippin’ out the back door / And all our good friends keep calling us whores” and “It isn’t just you / It’s the whole world too” — along with that nuanced, heartfelt vocal performance by Blair. When she intones “It’s been a hard couple of years / And I think I mighta run out of tears,” you feel the kind of hard pain that something like, say, a worldwide pandemic might cause.
On the whole Glass Pastures avoids sounding formulaic, though, thanks to the band’s infectious energy, knowing arrangements, and solid chops. Some playful, between- songs banter imbues the album with added warmth and energy, though I hope they don’t overplay that trick going forward. The album definitely throws off enough light and heat to make me want to catch this intriguing Lake Winnebago-area sextet live. As for future recordings… who knows? The Thrills, who provoked a huge bidding war between labels and made such a big splash with their first album, quietly faded away after their second, much labored-over (completely re-recorded, in fact) middling effort. I’m hoping with some perseverance, growth and a bit of luck, Dusk will develop that rare quality their influences all exhibit: actual staying-power.
Find the music and more information on Dusk here: https://countrydusk.bandcamp.com/album/glass-pastures