DUSTCOVERED
CARPET – rerededust the doubts I trust
(CD,
beatismurder)
Revelations come in all shapes and sizes, this one here
in the act of sitting down in some living rooom with friends and instruments
of the whatever is available sortiment and play some songs that come to
mind. The kind of collectivism, where, if somebody shows up without any
musical talent but likes to draw he is in the band nevertheless – and no
that is not necessarily a hippie thing. Think of the Happy Mondays or Avail.
Moreover, the Austrian ensemble Dustcovered Carpet is too focused, too
structured and not ecstatic and frantic enough to fall into the current free
freak folk collective trend. Probably without the freak and the free. Maybe
the old term songwriting fits best and we shouldn’t change what has been
working well such a long time.
Within the first song “pictures of the late fall
sun” Dustcovered Carpet amass the connotations of current prairie music
favorites: the singing swagger and stumble of Will Oldham,
the major-minor chord changes that denominate the emotional breakdowns and
excitement of Connor Oberst’s art of songwriting, the drama and
narrativity of songstructures as well as some of the arrangements of The Decemberists,
a hint of the harmonic ideas that (gasp) The Mamas & The Papas spread
over the world, and so on, and that is only the first song on this eleven
song collection. Is it all just a clever mix of other people’s ideas? No,
not at all, or if it is, then it is perfectly hidden (and we should ask
ourselves what actually isn’t...?) even if “Pink Glasses” has some
double harmonic singing Simon & Garfunkel would have been proud of, how
can you trace the origins of a universal form of expression? Anyway, there
is more than enough of their own spirit in these songs to make the “for
friends of”-tag legitimate and non-discriminatory.
The songs on “rerededust the doubts I trust” losely
fall into two categories: the intimate, single-person penned song that
started its existence with one person alone late at night and played on an
acoustic guitar first, an lower, subtler and more personal affair. And the
other category is the all of us together, fun-filled, sun-drenched, sing a
long narratives with melodies to stick for some weeks. This is where the
glockenspiel and flutes come in, where arrangements are not at all tight and
lose ends are welcome. For the first one I imagine a situation where the
song was written strumming so softly and singing more to the writer himself
so as not to disturb the people sleeping next door. For the other category I
very much doubt the idea, they were actually recorded on that eponymous
carpet in the living room, because sound and mixing are too good. On the
other hand, with the tools available in a modern laptop production is so
easy to come by that some artists have started to add the lo-fi noise and
tape hiss of yonder days on purpose. Moreover I am completely partial to
spreading a good story and not letting it be distorted by the facts.
It easy to doubt and be mistrusting these days.
Everything seems open and available to check and double-check. But that is
misjudging the basic facts that modern information technology is 99.9 % a
spoof (no, google does not contain all the information in the world, not
even by far, not even somewhere to a small percentage of it...) and that
people just don’t do it no matter what the marketing industry tells them.
Most people forget that no matter how much technology, how much
digitalisation and how many nifty tools there are available, some basic
rules that have formed over the last ten or twenty centuries stay the same,
such as action-reaction, love makes people blind, pressure produces
counter-pressure, a story well told sticks in the mind. And so on. And that
works in favor of bands like Dustcovered carpets, especially if they keep
their attitude of traditional handicraft as superior to mass production.
Summing up, Dustcovered Carpet have at least one up on
the other Austrian prairie music collective that comes to mind (A life, a song, a
cigarette) and that is a certain recklessness and abandon
regarding the ease with which they let dramatic effects and emotional
climaxes overpower traditional songstructures. Take for example “Poison
City” and its various instances a capella points of stressing a line or a
verse, its rhythm shifts and variations on the main themes be they melody or
content of the lyrics. That is gifted songwriting.
