There’s an ebb and a flow to Dust, the latest album from long-absent Austin rockers I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness (ILYCD), that pardoxically inspires and relaxes and so frustrates. You can hear it in the push and pull of the guitar and drums on “Heat Hand Up”, like waves lapping at the shores of an abandoned beach late one night (how appropriate the album art, then). It’s apparent again in “Safely”, a track that uses a dreamy guitar, a low down and pleasant drum and a bass line that sounds like an off-time heartbeat and in closer “WAYSD”, which again borrows those undulating rhythms. Even in a song that starts out as charged as “Come Undone” you heart it: slowly, inevitably, an impulse contrary to each song’s dominant mode oozes up. For the quieter, dreamier numbers this change is a kind of an elevation, a push that takes the song from its gentle theme to a kind of grasping for something higher; for those songs that began at a heightened pitch, such as album opener “Faust”, there will come a moment where the music subdues and the shimmery production dominates.
There’s a sound here that’s not exactly redolent of Echo & the Bunnymen’s more ethereal work but certainly does recall it: if it’s not an exact imitation what we’re looking at here is something of an adaptation. Though they’re variously labeled as members of the post-punk revival or gothic rock, ILYCD aren’t nearly so despondent as the latter, not so driven as the former. Rather, as in the best of Bunnymen, there’s a sense that the gentle sensibilities of more meditative mindsets pair perfectly with the kind of ambition, the kind of grand vision, so epitomized by the higher registers, higher keys and higher pitches. Celestial heights can only really be reached when what seems like abandon is couched in reason was always the ethos of the Bunnymen’s sound and ILCYD, who fuses this with elements of post-rock, seem to think so as well.
Unlike Echo & his Bunnymen though, the members of ILYCD have not successfully wed these elements. Echo and his entourage didn’t know that there was a conflict between their styles and so they were never hobbled by self-consciousness or too-obvious experimentation. ILCYD know what they’re doing, though, and they choke up on it. Perhaps this is the matter of an identity crisis; it seems unlikely that the same minds who fancy the earthy rumbles and water-droplets of guitar that shape “You Are Dead to Me” an effective evocation of Twin Peaks‘s (a point made in their press release) off-kilter air of lurking menace would be tonally aware enough to recognize exactly what it is they are doing. The tensions on this album clash throughout but what results isn’t a new, third sound, there’s no resolution, no synthesis of disparate elements. That ebb and that flow of watery guitars and those primal, earthen heartbeats from the percussion and bass which work so well to bring a listener to restful contemplation are served no favors when too-sudden shifts on the guitar and the tempo launch everything into an airier realm. And yet these guitars, with all of their pretensions of cosmic grandeur, are similarly disruptive. Worse than that, they are never particularly interesting. All the best work on this album is evident when the pace remains slow, when the emotions remain subdued. The fact that the singer never really belts out, that not even the most ambitious sounding of songs ever explodes, suddenly seems significant not as an indicator that this band is leveled enough to know better, to understand how quickly these decisions to go bombastic can devolve into cheese, but as a sign that the band won’t go there because it is not honestly their place.
And that is fine. The band even recognizes it with their name: they chose darkness because it is their element. Why they insist on pulling against their better instincts and their natural sound seems like the result of some misguided thinking or a fear of being pigeonholed. While this might be a fair fear — even their best music is obviously limited — there are ways to move beyond the limitations of one form beyond seeking to combine it with its opposite number. Too much light turns the dark to simple shadows and shadows hold no fascination. It’s the primal dark, the deep-down catacombs, that hold us in thrall, in music as in life.