dusted

Wonderfuls, a Brisbane duo stretched to three on this second full-length, plies a woozy, melancholic vibe, a codeine-hazed take on VU-ish drone and chant. The band’s shimmering textures of guitar (that’s Dan McGirr) and synthesizer (Natalie Buchanan) hover over murmured monotones (Bobby Bot or Bobby Vagg, depending on how you feel about nickhames), in a slow-motion or maybe no-motion trudge through slumberous atmospherics. This may be what it feels like to be heavily medicated for depression, muttering widely spaced, elliptical mantras while glimmers of beauty flash just out of eyeshot.

 Vagg’s echoey voice is an acquired taste. He clings to a narrow ledge of notes and occasionally slips off into wavery inexactness. Yet what he lacks in pitch or melodic variety, he more than makes up for in foreboding. He intones more than he sings, leaving big blacked-out holes between slurry phrases. There is a dream-like quality here, a hazy, never-was nostalgia. In “These Moments,” he half-moans, “We had too much fun,” in absolutely the most mournful tone ever to surround the word “fun.”   

All this bleakness would be tedious, perhaps, if not for the reverbed instrumental backing, which insinuates light and beauty into these downbeat compositions. McGirr traces glowing, baroque patterns in “Language Forgotten,” letting the sunshine in, dimly, through dusty windows, but all the same into Vagg’s narrative of vision, nausea and dislocation. Later on “Carparks” a music box melody leavens damply desolate tone, and in “What Is All This” Buchanan’s airy voice brings solace into doom-y Current 93-ish chants. The beautiful and the blasted bleed into one another. It is unsettling and compelling. 

There are no drums at all on this disc, which may account in part for the swimming-through-jello edgelessness. Only the guitar lines mark passing time, and they are blurred to glowing approximations by echo and haze. It’s the kind of record that makes you feel like you’re suspended halfway between sleeping and waking, uneasy in either case, but open to luminous beauty. 

Jennifer Kelly