perfume tree - another dusk (2026)
Nearly 20 years after they prematurely ended the Veloce project with Headroom, a minimal dub techno album that flew below the radar of specialists and likely confused long-time Perfume Tree fans due to it being a completely instrumental and abstract affair, Pete Lutwyche and vocalist Jane Tilley return to the Perfume Tree moniker - they say they've been busy with real life, but always wanted to get back to music!
I liked even Headroom (which was clinically cold and with an obsessive attention to details), but I totally expected for them to return to their roots, especially in the wake of the wave of big interest in shoegaze and shoegaze-adjacent music and right before what might turn out to be a similarly large revival of interest in trip-hop...
I wasn't paying attention when "another dusk" (in lowercase) got dropped on Spotify a few months ago - it just so happens I looked up their artist page to see if they have been discovered yet. At first, I was wondering if "another dusk" is the upload of a different band with the same name, but then I found out it's also on the official Bandcamp page of the band!
It's a mini-album where each track features a different sort of percussion, as if they were initially going to make a more creative retrospective, while Jane's familiar vocals are on all of them, but everything is so similarly hazy and evocative of a certain summery atmosphere that it feels like it's their late attempt at doing... chillwave!
That in itself is a nice thing, trying to do something different, but complementary to their earlier sounds. As for how it turns out... it might be because it's my first audition, but I'm not really persuaded by the new compositions. They feel more like jams... the first track peaks not very satisfyingly before diving into ambient territory. The one saving grace is a more memorable melody on the last track, which happens to be one of the few elements that remind one of dub - and I believe they might want to take cues from, say, Peaking Lights's best albums as to how to re-approach dub.
Well, that's my honest feedback, but it's not to say I dislike "another dusk"! Not bad for a warmup from people who haven't really committed to making music in such a long time... Looking forward also to see if they're going to release a collection of old B-sides such as "Pinkie and Rose".
3,5/5