Full Album Premiere & Review: Dunes, Land of the Blind
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on January 16th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
[Click play above to stream Dunes’ Land of the Blind in its entirety. It’s out Jan. 17 on Ripple Music.]
Newcastle-based heavy rock trio Dunes will release their third full-length, Land of the Blind, tomorrow, Jan. 17, through Ripple Music. If at no point in its history to come, famed London venue The Black Heart isn’t packed to the brim with a crowd shouting along to the line, “The devil’s upstairs and the god’s below,” from the stop in “Voodoo” on side B, it might be time to start thinking of England as a failed nation. That song, and nearly the entirety of the nine-track/43-minute follow-up to 2022’s Gargoyles, lands its hook with subtle confidence and expansive melody, giving Dunes — here the core of guitarist/vocalist John Davies, bassist/vocalist Ade Huggins and drummer/producer Nikky Watson, along with engineer Adam Forster and guest vocalists Ryan Garney of High Desert Queen on the aforementioned “Voodoo” and Nick Carter (Crane) who adds a blown-out, tired-in-the-North-UK (which is a specific tired) spoken word to “Northern Scar” — their broadest reaching and most resonate showcase to date.
On paper, Land of the Blind isn’t necessarily anything revolutionary: heavy rock band with a desert-proggy lean writing songs that stick with you when the record’s over. But that doesn’t account for the fluidity Dunes bring to the songs here or the purpose behind the album’s construction, which is designed to steer the listener along the dynamic course of the material. A key tell is right at the start with opener “Cactus.” At 6:26, only “Northern Scar” is longer, and in classic stoner rock fashion, the first two and a half minutes are a build-up intro. But the thing is, once it gets going, “Cactus” doesn’t looks back. The first thickened roll won’t be the last, and the steadiness of groove comes by the time they get around to the shove of the penultimate “Fields of Grey” to bolster the atmosphere wrought by the tones, effects, and overarching echo.
There are more immediate songs that could’ve led off. Just as an example, two follow immediately in “Tides” and “One Eyed Dog,” the latter of which brings the album’s title-line: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed dog is king.” But that intro in “Cactus” is serving the whole album, similar to the three-minute ambient-strum outro “Riding the Slow” reprising the riff (riffprising?) from centerpiece/side A capper “Riding the Low” to give a feeling of symmetry at the finish. These more atmospheric moments don’t have the same kind of impact as, say, “Riding the Low” itself, which will have you waxing nostalgic for early Truckfighters as it tattoos the lyrics of its chorus on your frontal lobe, but they’re purposeful in what they do, and it’s not an accident that “Cactus” starts the proceedings. One wonders if, over time, those quieter moments might not prove as standout as “One-Eyed Dog” or “Tides” earlier on.
That pairing picks up from “Cactus” with a decisive down-to-business impression, and indeed they get to the heart of some what works best throughout Land of the Blind. It’s not a full accounting, but they summarize the band’s thoughtfulness of construction, their ability to harness a flow between pieces of different tempo, their depth of tone, and the vocal arrangements in “Tides” as Davies and Huggins join forces at the repeated line, “Can’t tell where the water’s coming from anymore,” or in “One-Eyed Dog,” with, “Time keeps tick-tick-tick-tick-ticking away,” where the one backs the other with “ahh”s as something of a preface for the etherbound outreach of “Fields of Grey.”
“Northern Scar” is slower at the outset, the quiet bass and guitar there reminding of Elektrohasch circa 2010, but growing to something entirely more massive and nodding, and giving over to the fuzzy realignment around careening Kyussian riffery in “Riding the Low,” which completes a kind of back and forth while having stayed mostly consistent in structure, the long ending of “Northern Scar” with Carter repeating, “Lying face down in a northern town,” as feedback rings out alongside, is a diversion, but one which the surrounding material is strong enough to hold up, and which adds to rather than detracting from the scope of the entire work, picking up with “How Real is Real” with complementary push initially that opens up in the verse before asking the question, “How real is real for you?”
Depending on the answer, this might be a valid consideration. Side B plays out with according smoothness of craft, but while Dunes herald an emergent stateliness and songwriting mastery in these songs, and Land of the Blind runs front to back with no dip in quality or anything so egregiously out-of-place as to remove the listener from the experience. “Riding the Slow” takes its time in closing out, but provides a welcome exhale after “Fields of Grey” and “Voodoo,” and wherever they go, Dunes touch on heavy prog with no pretense of wanting anything more than to write their songs their way, honor their influences and engage their listenership. All of these are accomplished with righteousness across Land of the Blind, and the album would seem to be an arrival point for Dunes within the busy UK heavy underground. Whatever familiar traces one might hear in their sound, Dunes take ultimate ownership of the shape those take, and Land of the Blind feels declarative of who they are.
Maybe most of all, the abiding feel in Land of the Blind is that Dunes are laying it all out and putting everything they have into the material. These efforts are very much not misspent, and one hopes they speak of a continued growth that will carry them from here, but as the band’s third long-player, Land of the Blind doesn’t shy away from feeling like it’s what Dunes have been building toward up to this point, and the clarity of its execution — again, front-to-back — represents a strong collective voice. That is to say, the statement they’re making, they’re making together. With that behind them and enough hooks to spare that they could loan them out to other bands and charge interest, Dunes kick off what’s sure to be a busy year for Ripple and the heavy underground more generally with class and swim-in-it fuzz.
