Indiana Classic Album: Dust From 1000 Years - Natives

Dust From 1000 Years MFT page

(Listen while you read!)

Early in the 2000s, during the halcyon days where you could still book a tour over the phone, when the Internet hadn’t yet removed all sense of mystery from bands and musical artists, the term “freak-folk” filtered out of the college radio crowd toward a more mainstream audience. Tagged to singer-songwriters who had more in common with one-and-done auteurs like Skip Spence or Vashti Bunyan instead of average, non-experimental songwriters like Cat Stevens or James Taylor; Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, CocoRosie, Animal Collective, amongst others; all were labelled and informally grouped despite diverse musical identities.

I offer this extended introduction because Dust from 1000 Years, like the artists mentioned above, merit more than just a tossed-off, meaningless genre descriptor. Natives is a folk record in the sense that the songs are coated in a layer of tape-machine grime; these are songs of a people equally indebted to loneliness, love, humor, and despair. Musically, however, the record is unassumingly adventurous, organically branching out and examining its own strengths. “Neighbors” begins the record with a drone-y soundscape that gradually whites out, washing into the pastoral drift of “When Summer Comes,” which backs plaintive strumming and almost tropical percussion work with waves of white noise.

“Flesh and Bone” is a propulsive-yet-slow number examining the nature of emotions, its wordless bridge a stair-step guitar melody that will stick in your brain for weeks. Album highlight “Wrecking Ball” begins with thumb pianos masquerading as wind chimes, behind some minor key strumming. Unlike many post-rock contemporaries, Dust manages to pull off this slow-building ballad by creating a song that owes its heaviness to quietness and negative space, not merely over-compressed decibel blasts, vocalist Ben's reedy-but-clear style cutting through the lo-fidelity instrumentation. When the volume does rise, Dust pulls it off in a manner as introspective & brooding as anything by Godspeed You ! Black Emperor. 

Elsewhere on Natives, Dust mines other sonic territory. “Thanksgiving” is a country-punk anthem at the beginning, but grows noisier and animalistic as it blitzes through its 90-second running time, bringing to mind the concise, noisy sprawl of Sonic Youth and other 90s alt-rock. The title-track is a warbling, Western banjo number with distorted vocals, conjuring up empty desert spaces beneath reverbed guitar, reminiscent of Neil Young’s work on the Jim Jarmusch/Johnny Depp vehicle, Dead Man. “Space Nuggets” is an instrumental soundscape reprise of “Wrecking Ball,” all synthesized-strings and atmospheric hiss; “Bird of Prey” is a two-chord meditation over a fluid bassline over which vocalist Ben intones, “How can I know? / How can I know? / Is it starting to show? / Is it starting to show?” a quiet prelude to the ragged, distorted closing moments. Still, the band is best when they relax into blissed-out stoner-folk jams like “Turn the Light Out,” or the shambling beat and airy, near-weightless melody of “Totally Bone.”

A record full of interesting textures, hushed melodies, and a sense of stillness; Natives is an overlooked 4-track gem from a band as productive and mysterious as their name sounds; they released three full-lengths in 2008 alone. Whether you call them freak-folk, bedroom-noise-pop, or just damn productive artists, Dust From 1000 Years are sonic experimentalists quietly honing their unique brand of songwriting.

If you dig, donate to Kickstarter for Dust's new record!