Some records hit you in the gut. Others in the teeth. This Side of the Dirt does both. First note drops and you feel it in your ribcage, like a van rolling over your spine. Dusted Angel didn’t come back to make a point – they came back because they couldn’t not. Fifteen years since Earthsick Mind, and somehow, it sounds like nothing has changed and everything’s different.
Clifford Dinsmore’s voice is gravel, spit, bark – sounds like he’s yelling through a tunnel he built himself. He doesn’t sing at you, he spits the words into the room, and they stick. You can picture him leaning into the mic, one hand gripping the stand, one hand holding a beer, daring the band to push harder. And they do.
Eddie Gregor and Eric “Dog” Fieber’s guitars crawl and grind. One digs, the other scrapes, sometimes both fall into the same hole and claw their way back out as one big riff. Steve Ilse’s drumming holds it all together, loose and alive – more feel than finesse. Elliot Young’s bass drags the whole thing forward like a stubborn mule, that low-end throb that makes the walls move. It’s not tight. It’s right.
Forget trying to slot this into stoner or sludge or whatever. There’s desert in there, yeah, but there’s also saltwater and broken pavement and garage dust. The slow parts smolder, the fast ones hit like a rusted-out truck you can’t quite dodge. There’s no gloss, no filler, no posing. Just five lifers plugged into the same storm they started decades ago.
And that’s the real story – the persistence. You hear every scar, every restart, every night that should’ve been the last one. It’s heavy, not because of tuning or distortion, but because it means something to them. You feel that.
Dusted Angel aren’t trying to sound current. They’re not chasing revival. They’re just being themselves again – loud, human, and alive on this side of the dirt.
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Released by Heavy Psych Sounds on September 19th, 2025
