Dredg according to their own statements, they have been preparing for their comeback in the form of their sixth studio album for quite some time. With the release of the collector’s item Vault the (financial) framework conditions for this should finally be created.
„Dredg Vault – a bold, very limited collection of previously unreleased and recently sourced works of art, music, video and relics spanning 28 years time. The centerpiece is a 340 page hardcover book (10″ x 13″) signed and numbered, encapsulating the entire career of the band, from childhood to today. Other articles and relics include re-releases of early music, unreleased documentary studio footage, conceptual letters, maps, lyric books, as well as never released music. Each vault is delivered in a custom artwork printed box personalizing the experience from the moment it arrives. All proceeds go towards funding the new dredg album, LP #6.“ it says on the website set up by the band, and all the ingredients of the Vault on the Facebook page of Dredg twirled in more detail.
So although it is already clear in itself what the inclined follower can expect, here are a few thoughts on the package for fans who are still undecided – the box, which is limited to 1000 pieces, is not yet sold out, the purchase at just under 208 euros (if you don’t immediately opt for one of the many, many much more expensive tier options) but also anything but cheap, especially since there is also horrendous shipping (around 60 euros) and hardly less tempting import fees (which, at least in Austria, add up to another 60 euros total) come.
Adding fun. If he Vault justifies such absurd acquisition costs, of course everyone has to decide for themselves in the end – subjectively, however, the fact that the eternal bond of heart is perhaps enough as a justification for the high expenditure Dredg the income generated will be used for a new studio album and one is happy to contribute to it – but at least a small additional sighting from a less sober perspective can’t hurt.
Die „custom artwork printed box“, which coherently designed a declared part of the Vaults is, as expected, relatively unusable following delivery, because it has traveled around the world and has remained anything but clean and, moreover, it arrives covered with all kinds of shipping paperwork. Still too bad to throw away.
In any case, everything is housed relatively safely in a thick, well-made tote bag, which admittedly has some redundant stuff – such as stickers (plural) and pins (singular), a Pariah-Postcard and chic patch – carries along, contains basic but above all essential things: The one pressed on digipak DVD Making of von El Cielo (a nearly 70-minute collage of uncommented short film snippets that generate a fine atmosphere and almost instinctively suck into the process of making the record), a 34-page Leitmotif Storyboard zine or excerpts from Gavin’s Lyric Journals, the roadmap too Heaven and of course more than anything the heavy Vault-Hardcover book that summarizes the history of the band from 1994 to 2022 and you can lose yourself in it for hours. By the way, the foreword by Jochen Schlieman is worth mentioning – and how grandiose the first big one was, by the way Visions-Story too Dredg was, may be recalled at this point.
Basically – and especially from a musical point of view – it works without fan glasses in the Vault but also ambivalent, because it feels like a lot of potential has been left behind.
Made available once more for the first time since 1997 Orph EP is available on CD and represents a successful metamorphosis of the (unfortunately not included) Conscious EP from nu metal to the style of Leitmotif but. Casio Without Arms shows how it sounds when drummer Dino Campanella plays the band’s 2005 album alone on a Casiotone MT-500 (namely distilled to 41 minutes, surprisingly entertaining and entertaining, emphasizing the fine melodies of the record through the unusually anachronistic reduction and at the same time completely new rhythmic setting impulses). with Halong Bay is an unreleased B-side of Heaven on Flexidisc, which as a deserved but nevertheless successful outtake in blissful MySpace-Nostalgia and also shows that a complete collection of rarities (for which there is more than enough material!) would have been more fulfilling than this single song.
Even more frustrating is the almost arbitrarily selected (sublime, but somewhat too hasty) recording of which has to stand alone Cartoon Showroom (from the Dortmund Concert Hall on November 1, 2009) on a mini-CD because the grandiose concert was recorded in its entirety at the time and was also included on DVD in Visions Magazine, for example.
It would be on the Vault– there was room for the included USB stick. Instead, the storage medium is content to be a somewhat unfortunate cluster fuck full of grandiose, but hardly exclusive moments behind a few reasonably motivated retrievable images with manageable added value. The great Catch Without Arms-Making-of 3 Hour Banana (which lasts almost 42 minutes and has been known for a long time) would have deserved a separate physical release, meanwhile the Pariah-Tissue The Leaflet divided into 18 short snippets seems rather unhappy and the Coachella-Appearance from 2008 as pixelated as any YouTube version is – and thus actually inedible.
The demo of Where I End Up acts dreamy, sparkling in gentle psychedelic over a stoically differentiated drumbeat that runs like clockwork, more remote and unreal – almost in LoFi shoegaze/dreampop – than the clean pop studio version and thus allows a thoroughly interesting alternative view Chuckles & Mr. Squeezy to – but seems completely lost here without any context and almost accidentally ended up on the stick. Very irritating.
It’s just as annoying that the files of the USB music might have been named really carefully – if you want to play the titles on iTunes, for example, and value order, you’ll find yourself stuck at annoyingly unnecessary renaming for a while given the spit-out alibi sorting.
at To the Pivnica (a previously unreleased 16-minute collage for the 1983 film of the same name along loose sketches in an ambient environment full of electronics, tribal drums, synth pads and Stamp of Origin-roots) this is of course of little consequence, but it is El Cielo Brushstrokes (Blueprints) – 18 instrumental binders over 58 minutes, offering a wonderfully atmospheric companion piece to the masterpiece mothership and fragmentarily anticipating its interludes.
That Dredg have noticeably cut the material that has been circulating for years – absolutely bearable. Because the band not only manages the balancing act here to warm up the memory of the past, regardless of a few blemishes, and thus fuel the anticipation of the coming comeback with the realization that even the footnotes to the magical moments of Gavin Hayes, Drew Roulette, Mark Engles and Dino Campanella are actually priceless.
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