You Can Know Danger

Album Review

On their third album, the Portland, OR trio At Dusk plays a boisterously jubilant combination of funk and post-punk. Just because the band's boisterous and exuberant, however, doesn't necessarily mean this is an especially impressive work. This is extremely busy, cluttered music, the clattering drums jostling with spiraling, spiky guitars. The slightly whiny, histrionic lead vocals often trade off and overlap with rejoinders and counterpoints by backup singers, and the tempos often jerkily change and mutate, sometimes resolving in anthemic multi-voiced phrases. It's impressive in its well-pulled-off complexity, but it's also so relentlessly frenetic and anxious that it might be as apt to put you on edge as entertain you. That might be the intention, but it also leaves a trail of music in which the urgency of the playing and vocals doesn't seem justified by the obscurity and relative lack of substance of the stream-of-consciousness songwriting. For music so kinetic and energetic, it has an oddly distant, almost cerebrally calculated feel.