From Up Records
I have been laboring over what to say about the tenth anniversary of the release of Duster’s last album, Contemporary Movement, for the past few days. The vinyl has been flipped from A to B back to A again for hours on end. So I conducted some more research on a band I am already pretty knowledgeable about (which means that I know more than the Wikipedia article will tell you). What resulted has become part love-letter, part analysis and part personal narrative.
When I was conducting research for this feature, I found this: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2493-contemporary-movement/
It might possibly be one of the sloppiest record reviews I’ve ever read. The numeric score would qualify it for “Best New Music,” were it reviewed within the last few years. But the reviewer goes on to insult the band by suggesting that Dove Amber and Clay Parton can sing “three notes between them” and gets the song titles wrong twice. But I don’t want to offer any words on this album that might resemble a review, as I love it far too dearly to ever be able to subject it to any scrutiny or criticism.
But this review did prompt me to think about the world ten years ago, when somehow we managed to avoid instantaneous international collapse in the form the Y2K bug or any number of the doomsday predictions made about the arrival of the next century/millennium (though the millennium technically did not turn until 2001 as there would not have been a year zero). And how this apocalyptic drive of our society may have harkened back to the cold war era, which had just officially ended eight years before with the fall of the Soviet Union.
When the year 2000 turned there was some sense that the future had arrived—we had international connectivity and access to knowledge and porn with the Internet, computers in nearly every home, pleather pants, cell phones, filtered water, portable music players (mp3 players with up to 6GB of storage were publicly available), OnStar for our cars, electric cars (though not for much longer), etc. Short of hoverboards and flying cars we were in the future, and we lived accordingly. Reality TV blew up and changed our conception of how we live and how we’re entertained, and we became hopelessly connected, hungry for constant human interaction.
However, Contemporary Movement’s roots aren’t in the culture of contemporary America, per say, but a what was once contemporary in the futuristically driven world of Soviet Russia forty years before. Even the album cover evokes a sense of the future of the past with a grayscale photo of three stark, round, concrete structures—which my brother informs me are from the parking garage at the Seattle-Tacoma airport. The sounds are analog, recorded on tape, using tube amps and old-school distortion with traces of a Rhodes pianos in “Get the Dutch.” Yet the lyrics speak to modern problems of living in the future-present. It’s the combination of the future-past and the future-present that makes it an album both truly of its time and likely a rock record that will continue to endure for years despite its failure to make it to any kind of a widespread audience.
Lyricism evokes the times with “Get The Dutch” and strong statements like “escapism creeps into our recipes;” from “Cooking” “While People on the phone and talking to each other/Dreams come back/Later in the day;” and of “Now It’s coming Back” “and things change all of the time” feel like predictors of what would come in the next ten years as cell phones had not quite exploded like they would with the advent of texting and smartphones and how rapidly everything changes anymore—the increasing temporal nature of 21st century life and the phantoms facing all of us—phantoms from the past and the future.
Parts of this album did not reach my ears until 2006 (“Get the Dutch” and later “The Breakup Suite”) and I did not hear it in its entirety until 2008—I was only 12 years old when the album was released—but the personal connection I formed with it was almost instantaneous. After recovering from a long night’s drive back from an ameliorative trip to Kentucky in November 2008 I listened to it and within a few days my crumbling personal life and impeccably difficult academic calendar (consisting almost entirely of early ancient western history and early American arts and lit—also note I’m a slave to modernism and beyond). It marks a point for me where—within a few days—everything turned around and became better than I ever imagined it could be. And for a while they continued to get better.
In a way, Contemporary Movement, started a movement with me that brought me to some key breakthroughs—I returned to the darkroom and spent more time behind a camera, I bought my analog Korg synth and joined a band, I became more dedicated to my writing and to books, I ran more. I felt as though I had been half-dead for a period until a few key events reanimated me—and at the center of it all was Contemporary Movement. I moved beyond the troubles of my past and improved my present with the aid of outdated technologies in photography and music. It proved to be tremendously good for me.
Many might find it a bit unusual that this album has had such a positive influence on me considering that it is not particularly uplifting when one weighs the general heaviness of the tone of the album. It’s downright dreary and features “The Breakup Suite,” the second most depressing song that I know—the distinction of number one goes to Big Star’s “Holocaust.” Yet I have taken comfort in the words and chords of Dove Amber, Clay Parton, and Jason Albertini. Contemporary Movement is one of those rare instances of an album that encapsulates what it is like to be in a certain place and to see the world in a certain way. A world that is simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking, seen from the fringes and experienced in full—aware of what it entails to be human: painful, wondrous, distressing, and amazing
The more time I spend with this album the more I love every second of it. As soon as the first notes of “Get the Dutch” enter my ears something happens in my head and I engage, ready to ride the gentle tide-like nature of the album to the final slow, echo-y strum of “Auto-Mobile.”
Only the second of two full albums that Duster released, and the last official recording released, Contemporary Movement is a triumphant and important record that does not get the audience or recognition it deserves. Who knows what the Pitchfork review would have done for them now. I could guess that it would be edited (though the most recent review I read on that website contained some typos and was entirely too long), maybe fact-checked, and maybe even coherent—okay that’s stretching it.
In a lot of ways it’s kind of nice that Duster never caught on like their early 2000s tourmates and UP labelmates Modest Mouse. They—along with other Static Cult bands that formed after their dissolution–remain a nice little secret. The music feels more personal when your sentiments about it aren’t shared by a million other assholes.
Plus, the vinyl edition of Contemporary Movement is only $8 on the Up records website.
