2011, self-released

1½ out of 5

It’s not a good sign when the best moment of your new album is recycled from an old album. But sadly, such is the case with dredg’s newest offering, Chuckles and Mr. Squeezy. The ballad “The Ornament,” built on a familiar three-chord refrain written as an instrumental outro two albums before, is about the best that this record gets.

The hastily finished album was billed as a collaboration with producer Dan The Automator, the driving force behind such projects as Gorillaz and Deltron 3030. With such an impressive back catalogue between the two artists, and dredg’s previous brief forays into Dan’s pseudo-trip-hop territory, there were plenty of reasons to be excited. The past work of both dredg and Dan have shared some common ground—both have maintained a certain playful eeriness amid their genre-bending ambition. Even when their previous attempts to branch out stylistically have fallen flat, dredg could rarely be accused of playing it safe or of repeating themselves.

So what went wrong this time?

First, the image dredg pushes with Chuckles and the music amount to an awkward mismatch. The juxtaposition between the creepy masks of the packaging and the sterilized pop hooks contained within simply don’t work. Aside from a few relative bright spots (“The Tent,” “Another Tribe”) the songs are devoid of vibe and personality and make all the impact of, well, a collection of Dan the Automator B-Sides. There’s also little stylistic unity between the songs, and while each of dredg’s previous records contained lots of internal diversity, there was at least a cohesive atmosphere on each album. Here everything just feels disjointed and scattershot, with simple ballads (“Where I’ll End Up”) and near-dubstep electronic stomp (“Down Without A Fight”) sandwiched together with no particular unifying theme or vibe.

Second, while vocalist Gavin Hayes’ lyrics have always been somewhat hit-and-miss, they range from nonsensical to consistently lazy to outright just bad here. Worst offender “Kalathat,” based on the chilling true story of a tech worker who snapped and killed his family, blows the opportunity to create a moving piece of art from this this chilling subject matter through the song’s embarrassingly literal lyrics.

I would like to be able to make the case that in fact Chuckles is in fact nothing more than an ingenious post-release marketing ploy for dredg’s previous album, the stellar-by-comparison The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion, which despite its lapses into uninspired pop-rock, still pushed the envelope of what dredg is capable of as a band, featuring creative instrumentation, effective production, and a competent reproduction of the band’s organic live chemistry. Though a step below the peak of dredg’s first two albums, Pariah seems remarkably complete and exciting when placed back to back with its followup.

I know better than to place myself in the camp of fans demanding another El Cielo. The band is clearly neither interested in or capable of replicating the process or the moments of inspiration that led to their greatest work to date. But it’s fair to deduce that they are at their best when sitting in the same room, jamming things out rather than trading ideas online hundreds of miles apart, which was the case with Chuckles.

If there are reasons to be optimistic about dredg’s future, four come to mind. First, dredg, for better or worse, have never been content to repeat themselves. Each record, stylistically and thematically, has been very different from what came before it. If in fact there is a next dredg album, we can almost be sure it will again be a major change of direction. Second, the band has a wealth of good material that was demoed and played live in early forms that so far has so far not found its way onto an official release. Third, Chuckles was a collaboration (the band’s first attempt to do such on a full album) and a pure dredg record will not have an outside voice diluting the band’s chemistry. And fourth, if the trend continues, dredg’s strongest albums (El Cielo, Pariah) have so far typically occurred every other release. Having taken time off to pursue other musical projects, and just life, there are at least even odds that should dredg return, they’ll do something wonderful again.

In the case of Chuckles and Mr. Squeezy, however, change for its own sake didn’t qualify as an excuse to defend the end result.