It seems an affluent trend that the music coming out of Copenhagen these days is intensely commanding, emotionally crushing and incredibly dramatic. The newest addition to these ranks is trio Hand of Dust (featuring members of Marching Church, Lower, and Sexdrome), whose debut LP, Like Breath Beneath a Veil, is out on vinyl October 5 and digitally October 12 via Avant! Records.
Their track “Lighthouse” is a theatrical march towards nothingness across a torturous landscape of agonizingly human remorse. Simplistic, but undeniably powerful, an ocean exists in the composition, building and ebbing, and then building upon the peak of the previous swell. The desolate melody presses on, lost in itself, and the ground quakes with the full convergence of the instruments, the shower of cymbal crashes acting as a secondary distortion to the persistent clean chords and trem-bar dips of guitar. Frontman Bo Hoyer Hansen is a cruel deity hanging in the sky, his voice thundering upon the ground below. Heavy reverberations on his pained vocals create a ghostly aura of overpowering omniscience.
Hand of Dust’s Like Breath Beneath a Veil is available for preorder.
