Dustland

Album Review

The sophomore release by the Gentlemen Losers finds the brother team of Samu and Ville Kuukka again happily at work creating a contemplative series of instrumentals that readily mix and match a variety of guitar-based styles. There's as much a mid-'70s Pink Floyd zone on display — as "Ballad of Sparrow Young" shows in a restrained way — as there is the kind of gentle focused yearning one might expect from the Durutti Column. The latter is most readily invoked in "The Echoing Green," with what almost sounds like wordless vocals adding a romantic glaze to the performance, but perhaps the strongest theme throughout Dustland isn't musical per se but more generally sonic. The sense of found-sound atmospherics — the hiss of distant wind and other natural noises — adds a constant underpinning to the various performances; it's not quite the Baltic Sea equivalent of that murkily beautiful approach so many New Zealand guitar experimenters have tried, but it's not too far removed from it either. There's sterner stuff as well, as the thwacked drums and obsessive structure of "Bonetown Boys" shows, while the Mellotron touches on "Spider Lily" and tape fuzz on "Silver Water Ripples" add further glazes. But the concluding "Pebble Beach" ends things with a gentle melody and a full arrangement, a last sunset for an enjoyable release.