“The Lathe of Heaven”, adapted from Ursula K. Leguin’s Novel marks
the fourth release of Dream Into Dust and is based upon the themes of
dreams and reality. The album is as a whole dark and tortured with hints
of Experimental Industrial Folk and Ambient music, among others, recalling
the work of Radiohead, Einsturzende Neubauten, and The Cure. Apart from
comparisons with other artists, themes, and genres, classifying this
band’s work into one category would prove futile.
The album cover artwork by Derek Rush himself is wonderful in itself
as it is beautiful, dark, and symbolic and accurately represents the
contents of the album.
“White Autumn” featured a jaded and disenchanted view on life with a
soft and beautiful flute melody.
“Black Ice” is a scary track that brings dissonance and instability
to the album with restless images of driving on the icy winter road.
“No World Outside” is an especially interesting track. It starts with
heavy drum work and guitars and finishes with a beautiful haunting melody
from the string work near the end of the piece.
“Internal Return” offered a bit of a more positive and straight-forward
feeling than the rest of the album, featuring acoustic guitar work that
recalls too much of some of the stuff from earlier Radiohead. The music
of Dream Into Dust would probably gain a lot if they would get a little
apart from this influence and develop their own style more. Obviously,
this is a recommended record for those fans of Radiohead who don’t mind
listening to similar bands, with the plus that Dream Into Dust will
bring new dark ambience and industrial textures to the sound.
What I found the most interesting about this album was that, despite
of the dark undertones of the album and depressive lyrics, the vocal
work and melodies were hauntingly arresting and expressive. It was also
refreshing to hear some nice acoustic guitar work. A good work for lovers
of Emo and Electronica.
