Album Review: Dwellers, Corrupt Translation Machine
Posted in Reviews on June 3rd, 2025 by JJ Koczan
It’s been 11 years since Salt Lake City melodic heavy rockers Dwellers released their second album, 2014’s Pagan Fruit (review here, discussed here) as the follow-up to their 2011 debut, Good Morning Harakiri (review here, vinyl review here). Led by guitarist/vocalist Joey Toscano (here also synth and Rhodes piano), the band’s bluesy, psychedelic sound was a departure from the desert-hued cosmos-bound charge of Toscano‘s prior band, Iota, with a focused songwriting process and regular delves into the ethereal around it.
Corrupt Translation Machine — i.e., a human trying to capture objectivity in a subjective reality is doomed to fail; this is also why authenticity is a myth and gods aren’t real — is the unexpected third album from Dwellers, arriving through Small Stone Records in time for the label’s 30th anniversary with a reconstructed band around Toscano, operating for the first time as a four-piece and welcoming Oz “Inglorious” Yosri (Iota, Bird Eater) on bass, Kellii Scott (Failure) on drums and Chase Cluff on synth and Rhodes. Produced by Toscano with tracking done in Utah and California, the nine-song/51-minute outing offers a debut’s ambitions in laying out a distinctive sound for Dwellers that’s both inherited from and unlike anything they’ve done before.
Now, I called Corrupt Translation Machine a surprise above, and it’s true — until a few months ago, nobody knew it was coming. Toscano wasn’t updating social media as every chord progression or vocal arrangement was hammered out, as the things-are-different-now synth flourished into opening cut “Headlines” or the later “The Sermon” found that riff in the writing process. The band’s been gone. However — and it’s a big however — in 2024, Iota offered up Pentasomnia (review here) as their own back-after-more-than-a-decade return.
In fact, in Iota‘s case, it had been even longer: 16 years since their 2008 debut, Tales (discussed here, discussed here), which I’ll gladly posit among the best records Small Stone has put out in its three decades. Given the challenge of living up to Tales, Iota revealed a style that had grown into adopting many of the bluesy, contemplative elements of Dwellers‘ Pagan Fruit and Good Morning Harakiri, blurring the lines between the two projects. If it was only going to be Iota, Toscano wouldn’t have to answer the question, but in bringing Dwellers back as their own band requires some measure of differentiation. This leads to asking, if Iota now sounds like Iota does, what does Dwellers sound like?
Understand this: I don’t think Joey Toscano — guitar in hand and heart on sleeve as he reveals what would seem to be the emotional crux of much of the album early in centerpiece “Inside Infinity” with the lines, “Falling/I am falling/In love with a girl/Who is dying” — intentionally sat down with this material and said, “okay, now I need to make it sound different from Iota.” To listen to Corrupt Translation Machine, however, is to be given a second glimpse at the kind of evolution Toscano‘s band undertook.
If Dwellers had put out another two or three albums between 2014 and 2025, I’d probably be sitting here telling you Corrupt Translation Machine is the latest forward step in an ongoing incremental growth on the part of the band. That they’d become yet more progressive-rock-leaning, that the synth and Rhodes continued to play a bigger role along with the foundation in the grungey melodies of Toscano‘s vocals, able to conjure a sense of float in the chorus for “The Beast” and croon regretfully in first half of the penultimate 11-minute sweeper “Marigold (Heart of Stone),” “Marigold/marigold/I thought you could learn to love me/Sadly, that just ain’t your thing.” But that context and those two or three albums between Pagan Fruit and Corrupt Translation Machine don’t exist.
Instead, for those who caught onto Dwellers in the ’10s, Corrupt Translation Machine is something of a jump. For those who didn’t know the band before and picked up on Iota‘s return last year, that Toscano succeeds so much in finding a new path forward for Dwellers will no doubt be all the more satisfying. The synth is part of it, as “Headlines” and “Inside Infinity” and the sci-fi sounds building out the psychedelic-drone of closer “Made (Psych Ward Mix),” demonstrate, but Corrupt Translation Machine is also outwardly heavier than Dwellers have been before.
This is held back from the succession of three sub-five-minute rockers at the front, “Headlines,” “Spiral Vision” and the suitably bluesier “Old Ways,” but “The Beast” reveals a bigger low-end tonality, and both “The Maze” and “The Sermon” feel informed by European dark-prog in the blend of creeping lead guitar and roiling lower-frequency heft. Coupled with Toscano‘s capability to handle both sides of the Cantrell/Staley-type harmony on “Spiral Vision,” the proggier, somewhat metallic expanses of “Inside Infinity” and the resolution of “Marigold (Heart of Stone),” and Dwellers circa ’25 have no issue distinguishing themselves from either the band’s past or Toscano‘s other ongoing project.
And as much as the sound of Corrupt Translation Machine is on its own wavelength, the overarching, unifying factor between “Headlines” and “The Maze,” “Spiral Vision” and “Made (Psych Ward Mix)” is in the emotionality portrayed through the songs and performances. Even “Made (Psych Ward Mix),” with its Rhodes-chime sounds and ultra-atmospheric setting, retains a core of human expression, and as severe as “The Beast” might feel in the turns and rearing-backs of its first half, let alone the chug it unfurls from there, the emotive purpose is maintained, kept as a focal point within the breadth of the material.
That lets a song like “Marigold (Heart of Stone)” feel intimate while also being an 11-minute heavyprog epic, a crescendo for both the audio and theme of the album, and unrepentantly aware of itself in the process. If all perspective, all ‘translation’ in the sense of the album’s title, is flawed, then what humans are left with is the sometimes discomfiting goo of our own big feelings as the basis of reality. It’s a more complex vision of existence than ‘there’s one world and we’re living in it,’ but Dwellers‘ argument for intricacy takes place in multiple dimensions.
Dwellers, Corrupt Translation Machine (2025)
Small Stone Records on Bandcamp
