A Handful of Dust - The Drum Is The Shaman's Horse

The Dead C-related content keeps landing! Is it the 90s again? This is the first A Handful of Dust record since the passing of Peter Stapleton in 2020 and their first in a studio (definition: modest) since 1995. Stapleton's absence is obviously a marked one, but Galbraith and Russell manage to channel that loss into a coruscuating, cathartic expression that plays like there's no time to waste. The kind of emotion-heavy noise music NZ seems so well equipped at making - perhaps it's the isolation? - an undulating cacophony of shredded guitar, electronics and various other strings that hangs in the air like static, permanently on the verge of a take off that never arrives. Music without obvious start nor end, that doesn't much go anywhere as put you right in the middle of it. It's an effect helped hugely by the live-to-tape approach the pair take, lending the whole set a physicality and unadorned ruthlessness. Not so much the sound of screaming into the void but the void itself. Apocalypse now and again forever.