This BADASS album, that’s what:
Ambient master Steve Roach teams up with Roger King to produce the finest “western” album. A big breezy foray into the mythic west. The guitars have massive reverb and echo up into the atmosphere never to come down. It evokes landscapes with the great harmonica (what made ‘Jar of Flies’ Alice in Chains’ best album and what always worked great when Ministry used it.) There’s scratchin’, ‘shakin’, bottle scrapin’ and rattlesnakin’
Here’s some words from the cd itself:
"This is the music, and even more the soundtrack to the lingering ghosts and lost but not-so-forgotten dreams of restless souls, driven to “Go West, by God!”
The story shifts between the present and the recent past when a dusty trail was the only road west. The rails were freshly laid, still wet with sweat and blood. For better or worse, hopes and dreams turned real in the vast southwestern deserts, becoming a metaphor for a clean slate and a better life.
This is the music of ghost towns and boom towns, of families and loners; of riding the ribbon rails of promise to a bigger sky for a day’s wage, perhaps never to be heard from again – dead or alive. Back home, they’d ask, “where’d those peculiar folks and distant-eyed fellas go?”
Mortimer E. Sagebreath
Oracle, Arizona
“Dust to Dust explores the mythology of the west with a ‘country & ambient’ soundscape… The music feels like torn leather chaps that have been out on the virtual-trail for a while, making Dust to Dust one of Roach’s most melodic, yet gritty albums to date… It sounds like the musicians have strapped on six shooters in a Sergio Leone spaghetti western”
John Dilberto,
Jazziz Magazine
I say it’s the soundtrack to ‘No Country for Old Men’ that never was.
Here’s a badass example:
http://rapidshare.com/files/341334760/02_A_Daze_Wage.m4a.html
For those not interested in this but interested in electronica, Steve Roach’s landmark 1980s ‘Empetus’ is worth the spin. It evokes neon signs and lasers, shoulder pads and perms. Here’s a stormer: