(from bumblebeetree, Jan '03) / home / reviews index
Herman
Dune 'Switzerland Heritage' (Prohibited)
"such a nice drive / with the Velvet Underground."
'Two Crows' begins the Herman Dunes' third album with an almost-comically
jerked guitar hook and a definite, crisp air of melancholy. It's sad
and funny like a clown falling over in a foreign film. But no wonder
if the two brothers (and their drummer friend) are sad or confused,
because they're doomed to pine for a relationship that'll never work:
born in Sweden, based in Paris, they're in love with (aspects of) America
and the album's called 'Switzerland Heritage'…
'HD Rider' is all chiming march and backchant, all mantric reflection "from my window to the west"; 'Going to Everglades' tells like a conversation of American anticipation, hands bounce with delight against guitar strings like kids on trampolines, but then someone has to ask "what're we gonna do there? I mean, it's a country where they FRY people" and the other guitar pines like the holiday boys who left their bears back in their beds at home. It's a teenage love affair with a place of contradictions, but one it's not hard to relate to. It helps that the arrangements are so uncluttered too, traditional, everyday poetics with the 'anything goes' approach of HD's Antifolk friends. Despite Andre and David-Ivar Herman Dune both playing guitar (no bass), they chime together like interlocking offkey parts and will throw in the occasional extra: 'Black Cross' lies under a silly old wheezing Goth organ, scratching a guitar to scare yr mama. Oppressive moods are lifted by the innocence for instance of "like you always do-do-de-de-doo.."… deep pleas turned into nothing but music.
The album feels homemade but scribbled with love like its cover, slightly yellowed from sitting in the sun too long. Brown watercolour, blunt pencils and typewriter, Herman Dune ever looking over to their sisters the cows through their window to the west - a muddy view all the better seen through their hard filter. It's good…
