Label: This Is Fake DIY Records
Release Date: 28/04/08
Rating:
The over-riding impression, when you first listen to 'The Barbarians Move In', is that some dark and ominous stormcloud has edged in from the North West coast to settle over your room, and as a listener you can't help but begin to feel a little cold and uneasy. But you're soon forgetting why you ever craved sunny weather, as the sinister soundscapes conjured up by Duels start to give their own warmth, and provide the perfect canvas for Jon Foulger's dark ruminations on life.
Album opener 'The Furies' starts with the same regimental menace of 'Can' and finds Foulger giving his best Damo Suzuki impersonation to date. 'Perimeter Fence' sounds like 'Low' period Bowie and piano driven ballad 'The Healing' proves that all you really need is a keyboard, a primitive bass-drum pattern (and of course a great song) to get everyone nodding their heads like cooing pigeons.
Then there's 'This Year's Man', with a title which is at once both hopeful and desperate. It starts with an impatience you'd expect from a band who know that the other side of 2008 might just be one long and never-ending abyss. It builds and builds, with a last throw of the dice type energy, before dropping you off to let you catch your breath before grabbing you again by the scruff of the neck, and throwing you down in a crumpled heap upon the floor. By the end of the 3 minutes 52 seconds you're a shaky shadow of your former self, but grinning as you know something remarkable might just have happened to you. What's also apparent in its aftermath is that Duels have been dragging you along in the opposite direction from the contemporary traffic.
If Duels were an animal, grazing just beside the perimeter fence, they'd chew on the same pasture as people as disparate and desperate as Johnny Cash and Matt Bellamy - just at the edge of the herd, underneath a spindly tree, happiest in the shade. Sure it's dark, dramatic and sinister, but that brooding combination might just switch a light on in your head.
Bruno Hat
Duels Official Site
Duels MySpace
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