Freak Scene #66: Gold Dust Are Reborn on 'In the Shade of the Living Light'
Plus, Teen Driver's new EP 'veers toward agit-prop,' but so what?
A Guide to Music in Western Mass. (and sometimes Connecticut)
This week in Freak Scene, Stephen Pierce leads us on a journey into the heart of Gold Dust’s third album, Teen Driver take the wheel on their latest release and Rilo Kiley are coming to Northampton on their first tour since 2008.
Stephen Pierce decided a while ago to ditch social media. The mastermind behind the Easthampton psychedelic folk-rock band Gold Dust felt discouraged by a feed full of other people’s achievements that seemed unattainable to him, though he knew that the posts he was seeing were a carefully curated distortion of reality. Pierce also felt trapped by apps like Instagram that are designed to keep as a tight a hold as possible on users’ attention. So, he quit.
“It’s healthier that way,” Pierce says during the first of two wide-ranging conversations over coffee at Marigold Café in Easthampton, shortly before the release today of Gold Dust’s stunning third album, In the Shade of the Living Light. (The group plays an album release show tonight, Friday, at the Drake in Amherst with the Croaks, Silvie’s Okay and Mibble; tickets are here.)
It’s the first Gold Dust project he has made with a full band, after working on the previous two albums by himself. Bringing in musical collaborators helped Pierce more fully realize his musical vision, while broadening the perspective of his songs. It also tied the band back to the Western Massachusetts music community in a new and deeper way. Pierce lately has been thinking a lot about the importance of regionalism as an antidote to the everywhere-is-nowhere ethos of the digital age — another reason he quit social media.
“The algorithm is not a friend of community,” Pierce says. “I started thinking about regionalism more specifically when I got off of social media, when I took a look and saw how monocultural a lot of indie scenes were becoming.”
That’s in contrast to the way musical styles evolved before the internet: in the ’80s, for example, punk bands in Washington D.C. sounded different from their peers in Boston, or New York — distinctions that have more recently become blurrier. Pierce goes even further back to how regional folk variations developed fairly short distances apart in England, a topic that fascinates him, and also shaped his vision for Gold Dust after playing in the area hardcore bands Ampere and Kindling. Traditional English folk, regionalism and the DIY spirit of punk come together on In the Shade of the Living Light as Pierce focused his attention on his own community, and not just in a geographical sense.
“The first record, I was listening to a lot more Gene Clark and Byrds, et cetera, like, looking at the Laurel Canyon and all that,” Pierce says, referring to 2021’s Gold Dust and also to the Southern California folk-rock sound of the late 1960s that yielded groups including the Byrds, the Mamas & the Papas and Crosby, Stills and Nash. “I’ve never been in the Laurel Canyon. That’s not my world. I like the sound, but that’s not my world. So, I thought, what is my world?’”
Determined to find out, Pierce turned Gold Dust into a full band after releasing The Late Great Gold Dust in 2022. He added guitarist Ally Einbinder (formerly of Potty Mouth), bassist Sean Greene (the Van Pelt) and drummer Adam Reid (Nanny) to help him broaden the scope of Gold Dust. Not surprisingly, the collaborative approach yielded a different feel on In the Shade of the Living Light.
The new tracks sound at once airier and more robust, with sharper song arrangements and a deep sense of melody from Pierce. There’s a strong folk influence in some of the songs, including the slip jig “Traveler Stay” and the jig “Sympathy for Scavengers,” while other tracks lean more toward rock. Fairport Convention is a touchstone throughout. Pierce and Einbinder play complementary guitar parts over Reid’s powerful drums on opener “Whatever’s Left,” while “An Early Translation of a Later Work” evokes vintage psychedelia with a mix of spidery bouzouki, trebly single-note guitar lines and hazy reverb on Pierce’s murmuring vocals, plus a solo on electric sitar from J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. (These songs also include contributions from some of Pierce’s former bandmates in Ampere and Kindling, plus the Michigan indie-rocker Fred Thomas. They recorded with Justin Pizzoferrato at Sonelab in Easthampton.)
The centerpiece of the album is “Germs Burn,” a song that is almost a world unto itself. Ghostly vocal harmonies wend their way through swirling layers of ominous, minor-key guitar anchored by a heavy rhythm from Reid and Greene. Pierce’s lyrics are searching and vulnerable, though he shows a flash of mordant wit by dropping in a deadpan Kate Bush reference that doubles as a nod to Silver Jews.
“Germs Burn” is one of several tunes that Pierce wrote in the midst of what he calls a “mental health crisis” that culminated in his hospitalization in March 2023. Though he wanted to scrap the material he wrote during that period, his bandmates persuaded him to include those songs. Pierce reworked them to reflect a mindset centered less on wallowing in pain than moving beyond it.
“I changed things with an eye toward trying to make this record seem like a rebirth, because it is on a lot of levels, beyond it being the first with the band,” Pierce says. “It’s me on the other side of some stuff that needed to be looked at a lot deeper than it was and, after the hard work, rebounding from that.”
Pierce thinks of In the Shade of the Living Light as a debut of sorts, one that points in a new direction for himself and for Gold Dust.
“It’s helped me figure out what this band is, as more than just me, and where it can go,” says Pierce, who also designed the album artwork, including a beautiful 28-page zine-style booklet of credits, lyrics, poems and essays. “When it becomes a collaborative thing, I think it starts to take on a life of its own.”
Though he’s talking about the music, the same sentiment applies to his notions of regionalism — of pulling back from the increasingly chaotic wider world in favor of forging strong connections wherever we are.
“By strengthening our local communities, by being engaged, by doing the things that we love with the people that we love, we can essentially start to, hopefully, prop up each other,” Pierce says. “If all that is happening out there, then we have to do something here.”
Teen Driver Put the Pedal Down on ‘No AC’
“Debate Me,” the last track on Teen Driver’s new six-song EP No AC!, slides in like a prison-toothbrush shiv: it’s pointed and jagged, and there’s no mistaking the intent. The song spoofs debate-me bros, a tribe of very-online jags eager to jump into bad-faith arguments with strangers on social media about controversial issues. Teen Driver takes up the challenge with whirring power-drill guitars over a chugging rhythm as guitarist Mark Gurarie shrieks the refrain.
The song demonstrates how Teen Driver live up to the name of the band, with frequent stops and starts, sudden swerves and a general air of unpredictability. The Northampton group has a post-punk, power-pop sensibility that treads a line between abrasive and catchy with loud, prickly guitars and Riley Hernandez’s blaring synths, paired with pounding beats from drummer Carlos Jugo and booming basslines from Brendan Robinson. The abrasion is warranted on “Rest in Pissinger,” a savage sendoff to diplomat/war criminal Henry Kissinger, who died in 2023; while bright new-wave synths dominate “Moving Deck Chairs” by adding bursts of musical color to the catchy la-la-la refrain that belies a sense of fatalism in the lyrics.
No AC! follows Teen Driver’s 2023 five-song debut, Learner’s Permit, with song structures and musical arrangements that are more complex. Their lyrics are more direct here, too, and no less dogmatic. “Lyrically, the EP veers toward agit-prop,” the band acknowledges in a press blurb, but a) they do it well, and b) if not now, when?
Teen Driver perform tonight, Friday, at 7 p.m. with True Jackie and Owen Manure at JJ’s Tavern in Florence. Admission is $10.
Upcoming Concerts
The last time Rilo Kiley played Northampton was in 2008, which was also the last time they performed anywhere at all. Now on tour for the first time since then, the group has added a stop Sept. 1 at the Pines Theatre in Look Park (tickets), with Natalie Bergman.
The Tree House Brewing outpost in Charlton hosts Whitney with Folk Bitch Aug. 4 (tickets), while the South Deerfield spot brings in Kaleo Sept. 8 with Quarters of Change and Június Meyvant (tickets).
The Academy of Music in Northampton hosts a celebration of the life of Leah Kunkel June 1, with performances by Livingston Taylor, Jules Shear and Darlingside (tickets). Kunkel, a musician, attorney and longtime Northampton resident, died in November at age 76. Noah Reid is at the Academy Oct. 26 (tickets).
The Iron Horse hosts Big Freedia July 11 (tickets), John R. Miller and Tommy Prine Aug. 11 (tickets) and Pokey LaFarge Oct. 22 (tickets).
What’s going on at the Drake? The return of Mal Blum July 24 (tickets), lots of hands with deadharrie Sept. 6 (tickets), Stop Light Observations Sept. 25 (tickets), Pachyman and MNDSGN Oct. 10 (tickets), High Fade Oct. 15 (tickets), Weakened Friends Nov. 16 (tickets) and Beach Fossils with Being Dead Nov. 17 (tickets).
Signature Sounds brings music back to to Black Birch Vineyard in Hatfield this summer with Darlingside Aug. 7, Deadgrass Aug. 8, Heather Maloney Aug. 29-30 and Tuba Skinny Sept. 12. Tickets for all shows are here.
College Street Music Hall in New Haven has Peach Pit Sept. 13 (tickets).
A whole bunch of stuff is coming to the Space Ballroom in Hamden, Conn.: Christian Lee Hutson July 18 (tickets), Nation of Language Aug. 21 (tickets), Foxing Aug. 28 (tickets), Madball Sept. 17 (tickets), Bob Mould Sept. 21 (tickets), the Melvins with Redd Kross Sept. 30 (tickets) and Pile Oct. 10 (tickets).
Infinity Music Hall in Hartford brings in Ozomatli Aug. 17 (tickets), guitar virtuoso Eric Johnson Oct. 3 (tickets) and the Lone Bellow Nov. 17 (tickets), while the Norfolk outpost hosts Bob Schneider Aug. 29 (tickets).
That’s it for now, but Freak Scene is always seeking submissions. You can send music for coverage consideration to erdanton at gmail or reply to this email. Check out these guidelines first.
Thank you for reading, and for sharing this newsletter. Freak Scene is free, but donations are gratefully accepted. Previous issues are available in the archive.