Accessory
Dust
SELF-RELEASED
Dehd co-leader Jason Balla has been shaping his personal sound under the Accessory moniker since 2018, sprinkling the occasional breadcrumb of lo-fi pop for listeners to follow as our level of anticipation for what the project had in store slowly mounted. After a whirlwind period of ups and downs—including Dehd’s impressive festival cycle and a tour opening for The Flaming Lips and Modest Mouse, as well as more personal episodes such as suffering the loss of a family member and a break up with a live-in partner—Balla ground both feet into the dirt to carve out his first full-length project Dust, a somber yet resilient heliograph that postulates how cool to the touch a silver lining can be.
Stripping away the upbeat pop harmonies found in Dehd’s music, Dust explores a constellation of intimacy that rotates around the fractured center of organic love, hope, dread, and melancholy. Acoustic arrangements submerge into the buzz of gauzy guitars and frolicking piano to lend Balla’s debut statement an illusionary effect, like a hazy dream transformed into crystal-clear reality. Complex melodies create a sense of tension against vulnerable lyricism touching upon the woes of perfectionist syndrome, while the distinctive lo-fi feel of the album—glossed up with the help of co-producer Ziyad Asrar of Whitney—seeks to rationalize and bring light to the messy forms of an unpredictable, flawed human experience.
Hidden between ascendant piano lines and atmospheric rhythms, the album’s most optimistic song “Sunshine” tells of the impactful—and even destructive—experience of encompassing grief and alienation. In the track’s music video, Balla flows through the motions of depression and confused feelings while a dancing shadow is cast upon an illuminated surface, suggesting a sense of change that can’t always be observed directly. Buoyed by its polished recordings, there’s a void here when it comes to documenting certain unkempt facets of humanity that tether around the digital and natural world. “Safeword” broadcasts such a distance as we’re left with a pixelated and never fully rendered image of Balla. It’s up to the listener to unpack his warning about losing oneself in the pursuit of a controlled life without the extremes.
Possessing a much lower and colder frequency in comparison to Dehd’s indie-surf style, Dust expands on the dadaist zeal of crafting synergy between the corrupted parts of our world and the beautiful, natural elements. Metamorphic and metastatic, Balla infects his listeners with yearning reverie and crushing intimacy, resulting in a varnished polyptych of baroque-pop that takes an artful pause from the calamity of bleak news cycles, aching nervous systems, and polluted digital addictions. Like shooting a flare into the dark December sky, Accessory ascends into higher sonic altitudes and forms ice crystals around Dust that glitter in the sunlight, regardless of the weather.
