It’s impossible to properly review a Duster boxed set, but here goes.
There are four LPs here, spanning the two full lengths, an assortment of EPs, and a few bits and pieces committed to tape that never saw commercial release. There are no mis-steps here at all, it’s a wonderful collection of music and if you don’t already own it, it’s either because you have come round to the viewpoint that purchasing any vinyl in a time when you can stream it all off the internet for free or at most £9.99 a month is actually “not very sensible”, or you simply don’t give a shit about Duster. Personally, I had to snap it up as soon as I saw it was a thing because I am a person of a certain age that still needs to validate their existence via owning physical objects.
Previously, most of my time with the band has been spent listening to Stratosphere on Saturday mornings with a hangover and a cup of coffee. £4.39 off Amazon in 2010. Discogs lists the median price at £132.44 these days. What happened? How did this stoned shoegaze become such a touchstone, such an obsession for a core group of people who don’t leave the house that much?
It’s an absolute pleasure to get these songs into my hands and work my way through some of the material that I was much less familiar with. None of it is a waste of time, you get different Duster periods here – some of it sounding more like the slightly poppier work they ended up doing with Helvetia, some of it the utterly endearing fuzzed out bedroom recordings that I have very fond memories of from a single listening session. Drifting off to a beer hazed sleep in a hostel in a back water town in Denmark as these rare demos played on a friend’s iPod. A ridiculous day of getting soaked by the rain, laughing far too much at a nonsensical monster truck rally in a muddy field, and getting pissed on Tuborg in a nondescript bar, watching FC Copenhagen on the telly, whilst in the background a guy pumped hundreds of Euros into a slot machine and stuck it on autoplay.
It’s Duster. It doesn’t need a review, this is niche music, if you are ever going to be into Duster then you will find a way. You don’t need validation from a two bit broken down old website that is just a surprise PHP security update from not even existing. This band sounds like everything I ever wanted from music as a 41 year old white man who has long ago exceeded his capacity to take on board unfamiliar sounds. I’ll be here, just listening to this for however many years I got left. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.