Dusted began in 2012 as a low-stakes side project: Brian Borcherdt of Holy Fuck, the producer Leon Taheny and a debut called Total Dust, released by Hand Drawn Dracula and Polyvinyl. Six years later the second record arrives as something closer to a band. Borcherdt’s wife, Anna Edwards, plays lead guitar and sings backing vocals, Loel Campbell of Wintersleep plays drums, Robbie Grunwald covers Wurlitzer and synths, and Anna Ruddick plays bass on “Seasons” and “No Prison”.
The gap has a reason. A first attempt in a proper studio, built on quantized rhythms, overdubs and plug-ins, came out sterile, and Borcherdt scrapped it. “We just couldn’t find that haze,” he says in the label’s notes. What replaced it was assembled piecemeal over 2017, between Holy Fuck dates and another band, LIDS: three songs in producer Robbie Lackritz’s coach house in Toronto, “Seasons” in a basement, two tracks at Dreamland in upstate New York and the closer at Hotel2Tango in Montreal.
The haze is mostly made of old machines. “All I Am” runs on a 1972 EKO Rhythmaker that slowed down whenever someone switched on a light, which is why the band moved to real drums on stage. Borcherdt wrote it alongside Holy Fuck’s “Tom Tom”, as a guitar song pushed through that band’s electronics, and Edwards mostly doubles his vocal in a higher range, with Low’s harmonies as the model. “Dead Eyes” was recorded live by the two of them, both singing and playing guitar over a 1980s Yamaha drum machine run through pedals, with Campbell’s drums added the next day.
“Dead Eyes” is also the song most critics singled out. Borcherdt wrote it five or six years before the album came out, about taking a rejection you suffered and turning it on someone else. “Seasons”, the opener and the longest track at 5:24, is the band playing live in that cramped basement, a song about love going cold. “Cut Corners” ends in a wash of tape echo, and “No Prison” lets a blown-out bass take the lead.
Next to Holy Fuck, this is quiet and close, and the reviews in 2018 agreed on that much. They split on whether it plays things safe. At nine songs and under 37 minutes it doesn’t overstay, and it is a more focused record than Total Dust. The way it was made, live takes in small rooms after a polished version went in the bin, is the whole argument of the record, and it is a good one.
