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Amen Dunes - Murder Dull Mind

Murder Dull Mind by Amen Dunes

4...according to our on Thu 22 Jul, 2010.

This band certainly put the Fun in Funeral. Your'e probably not gonna get to have your big slice of fun pie. This record starts solemnly and doesn't relent over its surprisingly short running time. Its quite folky at first, then gets more dissonant as it progresses into the dark hearted dungeon of the callous. It bursts into searing feedback towards the end, but by this point you will probably have taken a pig and attached a rather fetching pair of legwarmers to its shoulder blades, and made it audition for the role of Willy Loman in a farmyard version of "Death of a Salesman". Its polarized opinion in my mind... on one hand it is a sweet piece of experimentalism, yet on the other hand you might begrudge the fact that there's not enough milk of happiness to fill a cup of tea... Buy it anyway you dirty feckers...

Recorded while Damon McMahon was living as an expatriate in China, Amen Dunes presents seven new stunning works of sunlit haziness. During the two years he lived abroad, he lived most of the time in an apartment on the north end of Beijing. He tracked these songs one summer in that apartment. With the exception of Diane and Murder Dull Mind, all of these songs were recorded in one take and are completely improvisational; on repeated listens though, there is a pop-ness to these songs amidst the improvisation. The title track in particular, a melodic mantra-like work could certainly function on its own as a single. Although the songs have a bit less pre-written structure than Amen Dunes previous work on the Locust label, they are still every bit as miraculous.The geographical influence on his work central to both writing and recording conditions is evident here as these songs are way more open, and generally more free than his debut Dia (recorded in 2006 in a Catskills cabin) was. A bit less psych freak out and a bit more dark folk vibe throughout.

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