Wisconsin band Dusk aren’t worried about having six songwriters, or about creating perfect studio recordings – they’re just here to channel the spirit of The Band with a bunch of loose, lively rock ‘n’ roll jams that evoke the reality of working class America, Dusk, a necromancing band that plays southern rock and alt-country, conjuring artists like NRBQ, Gram Parsons, The Byrds, and Emmylou Harris. Dusk’s new album, “Glass Pastures”, is filled with prestidigitating slide guitar, spellbinding harmonies, and thaumaturgical legerdemain. It’s magical!”
The songs on “Glass Pastures” are growing extra legs as they rack up the miles on a van that Blair and Grasley bought from a pumpkin farmer a few days before their run – including dates opening for comedian Joe Pera and their Don Giovanni labelmates Screaming Females in a national treasure twofer – began in Minneapolis.
“We’re a very loud live band,” Crowe says. “The energy from that contributes a lot to the way that we play. It’s more exciting to be in a room with an audience, cranking up the amps. I think we all dig in a little harder. We’ve been playing the songs for a while and are more comfortable with them.”
Dusk is a many-headed beast, with all six members being singer-songwriters in their own right, and when you’ve got that many moving pieces you have to find a balance between creative freedom and respect for the spaces occupied by your bandmates.
On “Glass Pastures” that balancing act is apparent in the way Crowe, Ditter, Grasley and Blair hand off solos to one another like they’re running a relay race, but they also keep coming back to the fact that Crutch of Memory plays such a prominent role in the record’s sound. Grasley thinks that the LP hangs together so well in part because of the quality of the air, the vibe, whatever you want to call it, in those rooms. “It helps for continuity between different songwriters, to have that blank space between the hits being the glue,” he says.
Dusk formed in 2014 as an amorphous studio project based around ex-drummer Colin Wilde and a bass-wielding Pitsch, who was fresh from completing “Predatory Headlights“, a massive double album by his pop-punk band Tenement that balanced concept excess with hooks, hooks, and more hooks.
Dusk’s “Glass Pastures” is out now through Don Giovanni Records.
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