By Jonny Bakes
Sometimes you can have a pretty good guess at what a band may sound like based on their name alone. Sometimes you’d be absolutely right, and others you can be so far off the mark that the mark becomes an abstract construct. Regardless, we all know that the only way to really get to grips with a band is to dive in and get involved as you may find yourself pleasantly surprised! Today I find myself confronted with Dust Prophet, which immediately screams stoner/desert rock but I will find out shortly as I take ‘One Last Look Upon The Sky’.
Hailing from Manchester, New Hampshire, Dust Prophet have spent the last four years toiling and crafting to bring their debut release to life. A debut that focuses heavily on the fragility of man and heavily influenced by ’70s psychedelic rock, it promises to take the doom and stoner scene by storm (Oh look, I wasn’t far off!). There’s plenty of downtuned heavy and fuzzy riffs, almost hypnotic slow sections and vocals that command the attention of the listener. If you were to try and pin Dust Prophet down to a familiar band, I would be inclined to liken them to Mastodon which I’m sure will pique the attention of a lot of you!
Overall, ‘One Last Look Upon the Sky’ is like the aural equivalent of a HIIT workout in that it switches between intense heavy riffage and slow psychedelia to offer your neck a bit of rest between sets. There are times when I felt myself drifting off into some kind of trance due to the out of this world nature of the music accompanied by breathy chanting, it’s enough to really take a guy out of the game for a while, but before you completely succumb to it, you’re dragged back to reality with another dose of heavy hitting riffs. But if you were to make a judgement based on the opening track alone, you would have no clue that this is a monster of an album.
The introduction to this album is a gentle piano piece with a background of faint distorted guitars that is certainly a relaxing piece but does nothing to prepare you for what is to come, instead it lulls you into a state of calm making the following track ‘When the Axe Falls’ hit you even harder! It begins with a foreboding snare rhythm before launching into fuzzy guitar that combines together for a pretty nasty riff. When the vocals kick in, there’s a strong resemblance, in my opinion, to Mastodon which is more than enough to float my boat and certainly impressive to bear resemblance to one of the stoner metal titans within minutes of listening to Dust Prophet’s debut!
The track that stands out the most for me is hidden away towards the end of the album, but is certainly worth the wait. ‘Hourglass’ is built on another heavy riff to carry harsh vocal passages that really stick in the mind, the one that really caught me was “I cross the sands of time for you… An empty world I’m forced to choose”. It’s bleak and foreboding but it also manages to get the blood pumping through the slow and heavy riff. ‘Hourglass’ will definitely be the song I keep coming back to for more, that’s for sure.
If this is indeed my ‘One Last Look Upon The Sky’ then I certainly feel that I will have gone out with a bang! This really is an impressive debut album from Dust Prophet and marks them as a band to keep an eye on. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see them pop up at DesertFest in the not too distant future if they generate as much buzz in the Über Kingdom as this album deserves!
Fans of Mastodon, Clutch, Black Sabbath and more will find plenty to get excited about here. I’ve certainly found myself converted by the Dust Prophet, and I suggest that you do too!
- ‘One Last Look Upon The Sky’ is out now. You can get your copy HERE.
https://www.facebook.com/dustprophet
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