Chasing Fridays: Duster, Destroy Lonely, Built to Spill live, and more

Yo yo yo yo yo it's another edition if Chasing Fridays. Another week, another seven days of me consuming and experiencing music. I saw a couple great shows within the last week and listened to several new releases that I really enjoyed, so I decided to go in on all of 'em down below. I've got a dissection of the new Destroy Lonely album that situates the current status of rage rap, a mini review of the new Duster album, and some thoughts on the small-town riff rock of Wilkes-Barre's The Virgos. Then, a recap of the Built to Spill There's Nothing Wrong With Love 30th anniversary tour, and a short spiel on a badass hardcore/metal show. You know, the typical Chasing Sundays shit.

If you like what I wrote down below and/or in any other article I publish on Chasing Sundays, then I'd appreciate it if you subscribed at the $5/month tier. My paid subscribers (thank you!) provide me with a crucial income stream so I can maximize the number of hours I dedicate to this blog, and also just writing in general. I'm very fortunate to make my living with words, but that's getting harder and harder in this economic climate, so any support is greatly appreciated.

Duster - In Dreams

Duster surprise-dropped a new album last week. It's hard to tell if that's a big deal or not? Duster are one of the biggest indie bands in the world now, at least by streaming measures. They play shows all over the place that appear to draw crowds in the thousands in some cities. That said, they surprise-released a new album a couple years ago and no one seemed to care. Do you even remember Together? I remember that it was released, and that I instantly ordered the vinyl, and that I was very underwhelmed by the music and only listened to it a few times before giving up and never going back. The record's forgettable quality is unfortunate because Duster's previous album, 2019's self-titled, was incredible and remains wildly underrated in their catalog. I actually think it might be a more interesting body of work than 2000's Contemporary Movement, the slightly sterile follow-up to their iconic 1998 debut, Stratosphere.

This new Duster album, In Dreams, is a course correction from where they were on Together. The songs sound like Duster always have: dreary, achey slowcore with guitar leads that echo and refract into stringy strands of psychedelia. It's nothing new or unexpected from Duster, it's just a better, more dynamic batch of songs than their last. Songs like "Isn't Over" and "Cosmotransporter" both kick up the energy with louder, more propulsive jam parts, which are elements of Duster's sound that were missing on Together. Duster have never been a slowcore band like Low where it's all about maintaining a sloth-like tempo the whole time. The loud, magnetic builds on Stratosphere are what make that record what it is, and I'm happy that Duster are bringing back the volume on this one. The staticky feedback that lilts the song "Poltergeist" to sleep is deliriously beautiful. The delayed warbles that peak through the fuzz on "Baking Tapes" are glorious. They've still got it, and I'm still here to lap it up.

Destroy Lonely - Love Lasts Forever

Destroy Lonely is one of several rappers signed to Playboi Carti's Opium label, alongside Ken Carson and Homixide Gang. Until last year, I didn't think any of these artists were anything more than B or C-tier Carti clones. Then, Ken Carson released A Great Chaos last fall, which breathed new life into the zeitgeisty sound Carti designed with 2020's Whole Lotta Red. While less abrasive and surrealist than WLR, A Great Chaos issued a smoother, sleeker iteration of rage rap that vitally extended the style's lifecycle. I rarely keep albums in my regular rotation for more than a couple months (even my AOTY gets the backseat when New Year's Day rolls around) but I haven't stopped listening to A Great Chaos since it dropped. In fact, I've been floating the very spicey take that it might actually be better, or at least more gratifying in the long-term, than Whole Lotta Red.

I'm not confident enough to fully throw my weight behind that claim just yet. However, one thing about A Great Chaos that I will go to bat for are Destroy Lonely's features on the album. Several of the record's best songs ("Singapore" and "Paranoid," in particular) contain great tradeoffs between the two Opium apprentices, and while I've always thought Destroy Lonely's solo projects were as faceless and boring as Carson's pre-A Great Chaos material, I was intrigued enough by those performances to give his new album, Love Lasts Forever, a fair shot. I'm glad I did. It's not quite the same leap Carson made with A Great Chaos, but the bulk of this record is extremely satisfying if you, like me, miss mid-2010s Future, wish Yeat's album from earlier this year was 10x better, and need something to hold you over until the next Carti (or Carson) project finally drops.

The first few tracks are a little underwhelming until you get to lead single "Luv 4 Ya," but basically the entire run from track five through the great Carson/Lone closer "Thrill" is immensely pleasing to my ears. It's certainly several notches above the extremely disappointing deluxe tracks that Carson added to A Great Chaos earlier this summer, which have none of the attached album's sauce. The main criticism I have of this record is that Destroy Lonely doesn't have anywhere near the same level of personality and pizzazz that Carson and Carti do. He's more like Yeat in that sense; his voice is there to fall seamlessly into the pocket of the top-shelf beats and provide just enough humanity to keep your head nodding along. Occasionally, he'll rattle off some catchy gibberish like, "This ain't a lifestyle, this just life," but most of the time he just sounds good even though you're not really paying attention to what he's saying.

As far as vibes-based rap music goes, you'd be hard-pressed to find a selection of beats that're better suited for slow crawls down dim-lit city streets. I like how Destroy Lonely deviates from the Atlanta trap beats that rage is rooted in on songs like the string-laden "Pimp Talk," the milky "Honestly," and the trunk-knocking "Take a Trip," which all have notably different rhythmic patterns compared to the average F1lthy and star boy instrumentals. If A Great Chaos was rage 2.0, then this is 2.5. It's enough of an update to keep me sated until one of the aforementioned maestros — or the underrated British rage MC, Lancey Foux — drop something better. Between this and the also-good che record, Sayso Says, that arrived the same day, my cup runeth over with pretty-good rage.

The Virgos - Road to Noxen

There're bands who hail from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, and then there are bands from Pennsylvania. The Virgos are a band from Pennsylvania. The power trio are based in Wilkes-Barre, a small, economically forlorn city about 20 minutes from Scranton and an hour-and-a-half from Philly. If you know about 21st century hardcore music, then you likely know Wilkes-Barre because of Title Fight, Cold World, or One Step Closer, who all lay claim to the city and its neighboring borough of Kingston. Otherwise, there's no real reason for Wilkes-Barre to be anything other than a highway road sign to people who aren't from there. The Virgos are from Wilkes-Barre, and they sound like Wilkes-Barre in a way none of the aforementioned bands (other than Cold World) quite do.

My ex is from Wilkes-Barre so I spent a good bit of time there over the last half-decade. The area has a vibe that I didn't fully pick up on until my fourth or fifth visit. It's bleak and sullen, but also quaint and charming in its own ways. You can get a full meal at a local diner for roughly three dollars. Everything looks and smells about 15 years older than it should. Even so, property companies from NYC and Philly are buying up buildings and tripling or quadrupling the rent, speckling the urban blight with tacky marks of gentrification that look absurd against the backdrop of rust belt gloom. Last year, The Virgos released an album called Pennsylvania Death Trip that sounds exactly like the way it feels to drive through Wilkes-Barre and its neighboring towns. A shrugging hodge-podge of grunge, doom-metal, NEPA-style metallic hardcore (Virgos guitarist Andy Saba played in the hardcore band Bad Seed with every member of Title Fight), and White Zombie-indebted road rawk, the album struck me for how daringly eclectic and understatedly powerful the songs are. It captures the exact vibe of Wilkes-Barre; somehow both urban and rural, downtrodden and poignant, and grim without being humorless.

This week, The Virgos surprise-dropped another record called Road to Noxen (Live). All 10 songs have the word "(Live)" next to their titles even though most of them, as far as I can tell, have never been released, making them "live" versions of brand new tracks. Also, none of the recordings sound particularly "live" except for the dulcet cricket sounds that are pasted in front of each tune, as if to imply this whole thing was tracked at some abandoned shack in the middle of the woods. I like to think it was. Road to Noxen is a little grungier and less bruising than Pennsylvania Death Trip, but there're still some riffs that randomly sound like Sepultura, and then a bunch of others that sit somewhere between Kyuss and Soundgarden. Grunge and stoner-rock are two separate yet similar genres, and The Virgos crudely mash them together in a way that shouldn't totally work on paper but somehow does in execution.

Road to Noxen doesn't sound like music that could be made within the confines of a major metropolis. The Virgos have the sort of quirky, small-town charm that's harder to come by these days at a time when rock bands are often so rigid and meticulous in what they're trying to achieve. The Virgos are just playin'. They're just rippin'. You can tell they don't really give a shit whether you like it or not, and that's what I like about them. That's also what I like about Wilkes-Barre. A city that feels indifferent to the opinions of outsiders like me.

Built to Spill @ Mr. Smalls Theatre

Last Friday, I caught the Pittsburgh date of Built to Spill's There's Nothing Wrong With Love 30th anniversary tour. It was my third time seeing the band at this venue, the last time being their Keep It Like a Secret 20th anniversary tour in 2019. Built to Spill are one of my favorite bands, and depending on the day, There's Nothing Wrong With Love is my favorite album of theirs, so I felt a jolt of excitement as soon as this tour was announced. As the show neared closer and I started asking my friends if they planned on going, my excitement began to wane a bit as I remembered the previous Built to Spill show I saw. The 2019 one had the potential to be an all-timer for me, but in truth, the band's performance left a lot to be desired. KILAS is filled with elaborate dual guitar parts, but Doug Martsch decided to play that tour without a rhythm guitarist, stripping gargantuan rock songs like "Carry the Zero" and "Broken Chairs" of half their bulk. Some of the most glorious guitar songs I've ever heard just sounded OK coming out of the monitors. That shouldn't have been the case.

I went in to this show with my expectations lowered, and fortunately, they were exceeded by the end of the night. Once again, Martsch was the only guitarist onstage, but this time he enlisted a cellist to play the rhythm guitar parts and sometimes even take on the dazzling leads (as well as the actual cello parts that can be heard on songs like "Fling," "Stab," and "Car"). Hearing scrappy indie-rock gems like "Big Dipper" and "Distopian Dream Girl" be adorned with elegant string strokes put a fresh — but not too fresh — spin on some of my favorite songs ever, and made the whole set so much more enjoyable than the thin-sounding KILAS one was. They played the record from front to back and then returned for a 30-minute encore that concluded with a 10-minute klezmer style jam on "When I'm Blind," in which Martsch and his very talented rhythm section each had ample opportunity to solo. It rocked. Perfect From Now On turns 30 in 1997, and if Built to Spill play it in Pittsburgh, then I'll be there. Maybe they'll get a harpist for that one.

Fuming Mouth, Cemented in Fear, Spiral @ Preserving Underground

This was another hardcore/metal show in the closet-sized "DIY Room" of Preserving Underground, the premier Pittsburgh venue for capital-"h" Hardcore. The last band I saw in this space was Torture, who ended up playing the most violent show I've ever seen. This time, I finally got to see the Boston death metal/hardcore behemoths Fuming Mouth, who I've loved for years but somehow never had the opportunity to catch live. The show was free, announced just five days in advance, and still managed to draw roughly 100 heads, including a bunch of new faces who fit in nicely with the hard moshers who come out to every heavy hardcore show in Pittsburgh.

Local Deftones-core upstarts Spiral opened the set and got a respectful reaction from a crowd who were really just there to mosh. Beatdown native sons Cemented in Fear were up next and they absolutely clobbered. The tiny room (where there's almost nowhere to hide — it's literally an old storage closet) erupted into a frenzy of crowd-killers who bashed and swung along to the band's bouncy beatdown songs. I saw them get a similarly wild reaction at a beatdown festival at Preserving last winter, and this set once again confirmed why they're one of the better-liked heavy hardcore bands in Pittsburgh right now.

Fuming Mouth followed, and while a couple dozen people had dipped by this point, the people who stayed were there to beat ass. The band's Swedish death metal guitar tones are fucking nasty, and most of their songs are chuggy and trudging enough to be moshed to from front to back. They sounded incredible and I saw some wildly impressive action on the dancefloor, particularly from bigger boys with unlimited stamina who know how to spin-kick proficiently and hurl their bodies against others like human bowling balls. No fights, no bad vibes, and no drunk bullshit. It was everything a heavy hardcore show should be.