CIA Debutante - Dust

For whatever reason (let's call it 'resource scarcity') we weren't able to get copies of the latest CIA Debutante album on its release midway through last year. Thankfully our ever virtuous patience has paid off, and Siltbreeze have done the right thing in re-pressing what is, for my money, the best record the duo have made to date. It's not that Dust is markedly different to any other C-D collection - far from it, in fact: this is a very C-D sounding set of songs - more that it feels like they've reached some kind of apex of their particular approach. And what an approach it continues to be, combining Ballardian body shock (all bathhouses and massage parlours) with the oppressive paranoia of Foucault's surveillance society, pressed into a murky grey mulch that's as greasy as Blade Runner rain. They make a thrilling poetry out of fairly bleak material - people decay, technology fails, society falls apart, bottles of Pernod lie empty - and as you'd imagine from such subject matter, there's some obvious through lines to TG and the central tenets of industrial music, and no little Suicide and Cabaret Voltaire (circa The Voice of America) in the mix, too. We've made these comparisons before of course, but on Dust they seem to do it just that bit more impressively. Are the songs just better? Is their overall delivery just that bit more confident? Whatever, it's mystically sinister and threatening business that manages to jettison all comparison in its fogged wake. I think i misheard one of the lyrics as "like a psychedelic Siddhartha". Let that be the final word on the matter.