dust!

Album Review

One wonders if this is what experiencing a good LSD trip was like — dust! is a delightfully eerie album that sounds about three decades (at least) out of its own time. Anyone looking for a follow-up to Surrealistic Pillow or Notorious Byrd Brothers can random access this CD and find exactly what they're looking for, and the sheer audacity of tracks like "Sway" or "Just Let Go," and their left-turn into bluesy country on "The Ballad of Lucy and Lucky" is par for a delightfully challenging course, filled with surprises that sound like they've been retrieved by time-machine from across the first seven decades of the 20th century — and sometimes overlaying two decades at once, as on "Strange Lights/Western Skies," which seems to pull in equal measures from '30s country-blues, '60s protest songs, and an early Pink Floyd session or two — from there to a far-back-in-the-woods ironic country gospel piece called "Karma" might be enough to make one dizzy, except that by the time you get to that number, all of the anchor chains of expectations have been sheered and left behind, and the listener just goes with the flow.