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Last Dinosaurs: Yumeno Garden

Article originally appeared on The Music

Last Dinosaurs have always had the sort of sound that feels like bubbles floating through a picturesque car commercial, clean, soapy, and hard to connect to without bursting the veneer. For their third studio album, Yumeno Garden, the Brisbane boys have done little to alter their output.

Erring on the pop side of rock, the album is full of velcro hooks and circular choruses that do an admirable job of lodging in your brain, but barring one or two slow dives everything proceeds at a predictable, albeit enjoyable, tempo. The overall effect is one of mild homogeneity, with individual songs not selling themselves so much as painting a sonic spectrum. This staid approach to songwriting leaves a catalogue of tracks that could be easily shuffled between albums with little to no consequence. 

The production itself shows an interesting trend towards the sort of under-blown yet encompassing back end prevalent on most vaporwave masters. While intriguing and expansively lush, any subtleties are quickly engulfed like cookie crumbs falling on a deep plush carpet.

Yumeno Garden is bound to be well received and will certainly make a fine addition to any cafe soundtrack, but for a band edging up on its first decade it shows surprisingly little growth.

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Mark Lanegan & Duke Garwood: With Animals

Article originally appeared on The Music Aug 21st 2018

Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood have circled each other for over a decade, with Garwood’s guitar strung across both Gargoyle and Blues Funeral, yet, this is only their second double billed album.

Following on from the five-year-old, Black Pudding, the pair have created something a little lighter on the palate, let’s say white souffle by way of the bayou, but that doesn’t betray its density.

For fans of their equally extended careers, there’ll be some retread, though it’s less like local streets and more akin to visiting cemetery kin. The new ground covered is fresh and dirty as turned earth.

Inherently touching and darkly familiar, With Animals dulcet batch of misery is a slow-motion gut punch — the sort of thing that might slip out of a whiskey bottle onto a dusty old porch, staining a permanent lineament. There is so much gravel washed sadness you’d be forgiven for missing the slight social commentaries embedded in Lanegan’s lyrics. The title track’s knife-like chorus, “Girl, you are a murderer,” serves as an ode to meat consumption and also a wonderfully anti-romantic diatribe — combined with Garwood’s cutting compositions, their songs have a tendency to stick in your soul.

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