Cooking Light From May 2016

When Duster were recording their space rock mini-epics on wobbly four-track in a makeshift San Jose home studio in the late '90s, it's likely they weren't imagining that their records would someday be fetching exorbitant prices and that a classy reissue label would someday issue a box set. No doubt they were just having fun making music, expressing themselves, and exploring sound for its own sake, but history has a way of taking strange turns, and in 2019 the Numero Group's Capsule Losing Contact was released. The lavishly packaged set gathers the two albums (1998's Stratosphere and 2000's Contemporary Movement) and one EP (1999's 1975) they released for Up Records and adds the Transmission, Flux EP, the Apex, Trance-Like single, and a handful of rare and previously unreleased tracks. The collection finally restores the music of Duster to people who can now afford to own it and every fan of slowcore, lo-fi space rock and unassumingly brilliant indie rock should plunk down their money and get this set.

Andy Grammer returns with a new CD that may be the most rewarding and introspective recording of his career. The disc features 13 stellar performances, all of which Grammer is credited with co-writing. Bookended with singles "Smoke Clears" and "Give Love", the album features stellar grooves and the positive vibes that Grammer is known for, but there are plenty of tunes which celebrate the complexity of being a human being. Life is messy seems to be the message of some of these selections. On the stellar "Workin' On It", Grammer opines "we all got monsters that don't see the daylight, skeletons you're hiding ain't going to leave overnight", concluding that the best we can do is to be "workin' on it". The title song "The Good Parts" actually refers to the failures and faults that we hide deep inside, insisting that we need to be vulnerable enough to not "leave the good parts out".