Amen Dunes a.k.a. Damon McMahon is back and this time he’s coming for your children with a knife. No, I’m sorry, that’s not true at all! I meant to say that he has a new album! Please, put those thoughts of Amen Dunes rushing up to your daughter on the playground with a wild look in his eyes out of your mind. There’s nothing to substantiate those rumors. In fact, making an album is a really positive, non-violent thing to do, so I’m glad Amen Dunes chose that path instead of choking a toddler before he/she had a chance at life. It would be just terrible if Amen Dunes chose the alternative. I commend him for narrowly escaping this conundrum again.
Back in the halcyon, murder-less days of 2009, Amen Dunes’ debut album Dia was released on Locust and (privately) loved by many here at TMT. Interestingly, those recordings were made way back in the fall of 2006 and left to rot until somebody smart came up to him and said, “Were you harassing my child at the supermarket, he’s been sobbing in his room all week!” No, shoot, I’m sorry. That’s not what they said. It was more like, “You better release those recordings pronto because you have a unique voice and you can conjure really dense songs that sound like they’re beamed from the past and the future at the same time.” Mr. Dunes also released the Murder Dull Mind EP on Sacred Bones last summer, comprised of recordings he made after he moved to Beijing (but before Dia was released!). Those songs were also a delight and the lyrics in no way resembled detailed instructions on how to snuff out the life of those with yet-undeveloped brains.
Now it’s the present day, no one involved in this story has yet been charged with infanticide, and Sacred Bones is proud to put out Amen Dunes’ sophomore album on August 16, entitled Through Donkey Jaw. Because of the lag time between recording and releasing the last album/EP, these are actually the first Amen Dunes recordings in nearly five years, so they should sound quite a bit different — almost as if the artist had gone through a troubling, life-changing experience during that time. Word on the press release street is that the songs on Through Donkey Jaw are bigger and badder compared to the acoustic, improvised-on-the-spot nature of Murder Dull Mind (setting aside the noise cloud memory eraser “Ruined Girlies”), and they’re described as the “winter” to that EP’s “summer.” I wouldn’t rule out a bunch of these songs slaying, and even the recording engineer agreeing that he killed them. The songs.
Through Donkey Jaw tracklist:
01. Baba Yaga
02. Lower Mind
03. Swim Up Behind Me
04. 1985
05. Not a Slave
06. Jill
07. Sunday
08. For All
09. Good Bad Dreams
10. Bedroom Drum
11. Lezzy Head
12. Christopher
13. Gem Head *
14. Tomorrow Never Knows *
* CD only
• Amen Dunes: http://www.myspace.com/amendunes
• Sacred Bones: http://www.sacredbonesrecords.com
