EP Review: Junk Drawer - ‘The Dust Has Come To Stay’
In hindsight, a band releasing their debut album in April 2020 was unfortunate and Spinal Tap-esque timing, particularly given it was called ‘Ready for the House’ which surely wasn’t a coincidence. Belfast quartet Junk Drawer didn’t let that near-catastrophic setback stop them from working on new music and vacuum packing it into ‘The Dust Has Come To Stay’ EP.
‘Tears In Costa’ gets the EP’s pendulum swinging and it sounds like a Mac DeMarco song sung by Julian Casablancas. I could imagine the chorus riff being played on loop on a battered old radio in some slow-burning US indie film in a gas station where the lead actor (probably Keanu Reeves) spends something like 10 minutes trying to choose between a Mountain Dew and a Gatorade, much to the annoyance of the dodgy in appearance but ultimately harmless college dropout who’s sweating buckets and questioning his life choices behind the till. Good song though.
I reckon ‘Railroad King’ is what King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard would sound like if they drank decaf coffee. Quite one-dimensional and rough around the edges as the shoegaze genre can be but it’s not an unpleasant listen. Equally, it’s not hugely fascinating.
The same can’t be said about ‘Suspended Anvil’ which leads you down a similar path before the wheels start to slowly melt off the acid bus at half-time. The band are at their best when you’re not quite sure where they’re taking you.
Rounding things off, ‘Middle Places’ has an interesting bout of guitar wrestling around the start of the fourth and final minute but then it quickly taps out and returns to its corner without much else to say for itself. It’s a shame it’s not the memorable showdown that some of the previous songs merited, so by balance ‘The Dust Has Come To Stay’ is probably stuck in the middle somewhere between Mountain Dew and Gatorade.
Words by Richard Cobb
