Like Arthur Russell, this is pop music as experiment, a meshing together of approaches and traditions, a playful mixture of tone poems, percussive excursions, and off-kilter melody. It feels liberatory, easy.

Full Review

Best of 2017

Worst of 2017

Recent Reviews

Drowned in Sound

It’s not the sound of an artist finding her true voice. That would be too much of a cliché to apply to this delightful album. It is, however, Laurel Halo’s most ecstatically esoteric effort to date, which, in the case of this artist at least, is another way of saying that is both her best and her most joyously listenable.

Dust, hopefully, is a momentary glistening incarnation of a genuinely forward-thinking musical project.

A more challenging and elusive listen than the felted atmospherics of Chance of Rain or In Situ, this is Halo at her most artful and poetic.

‘Dust’ is a LP that is stitched together from a wide array of influences; electronica, jazz, pop, classical – the list could go on. It’s an album hard to pigeon-hole, but one thing is for sure, Laurel Halo has created a truly distinctive record which will transport any listener instantly into her unique world.

Halo's records have always posed tricky questions, and Dust features her most complex and engrossing yet.

Dust, Halo’s third album and first in four years, is a high point in her discography, working multiple, sometimes disparate, elements together while letting them retain their identities in a way few others could.

Far beyond a cut-and-paste collage of genres and moods, Dust is a thrilling attempt to escape all the usual points of classification, to collapse the primacy of the human voice, and to obscure and reveal at unexpected moments.

Highly recommended; this time around there’s nothing to fear.

Really, it's remarkable that any of it works at all. Rarely, if ever, has an artist made such a broad array of inputs—Arthur Russell's alien melodies, Pierre Schaeffer's heady tape jumble, post-Ghostly house music, Richard D. James' undanceable dance music, the crushing intimacy of Karen Dalton and Judee Sill, and even the ebullience of vintage Madonna—sound destined to be together.

5mo

It makes for an album that often feels more like a computer assembling human parts than the other way around, and accordingly leaves an uncanny, opaque footprint that feels distinct from anything Halo has done so far.

Dust is very disorienting and not always easy to grasp hold of, but it never comes close to sounding like anything else, and its best moments are highly compelling.

‘Dust’ is divisive and at times challenging. Yet, in Halo’s restless experimentalism we find moments of unexpected beauty.

Compared to Halo’s previous outings, it is hard to connect to the album on a visceral or immediate level, and there are few moments that provide direct enjoyment.

Full Review

User Reviews

View All

EntryIncomplete

100

The more time I spend with this record, the more I fall in love with it. It's a record that isn't limited to anything but its own, flowing will. Laurel pulls from all kinds of different sources, merging jazz, classical and ambient textures to create this dizzying, psychadelic and organic soundscape. Dust is in many ways, ugly, stumbling and crude, but it's from these awkward meshings of sound and style that new beauty flourishes.
And Dust is a beautiful record to me. A kind of haunting, ... read more

Gupla

“El polvo no tiene realmente un lugar o un origen específico. Hay mucho peso en la palabra ‘polvo’, en términos de un proceso de cambio, o un proceso de convertirse, o un proceso de resolución.” Dice Laurel Halo en una reciente entrevista con The Fader.

Detrás de estas declaraciones se encuentra un sentido de renovación, tanto en su ser, como en su dominio personal. El perfil remoto de Laurel denotaba una identidad retraída que ... read more

4y*