The Dustin Bentall Outfit
Six Shooter
Having a mustachioed sportswriter dad whom all the other Oilerphile kids got too excited about, I always give the children of notable musicians extra patience. Dustin (son of Barney) Bentall’s first album Streets With No Lights was both indie and slick, the title track making it onto the Best of 2005 Mix for its raw and direct wickedness. He knows it to this day, as it comes up on his website still.
Adding the words “The” and “Outfit” to his billing almost immediately raises suspicions — suspicions that turn out, unfortunately, to be justified. Bentall mentions the highway within the first few seconds of his new album, giving me that uncomfortable Roadhammers feeling, that urge to look away from the stage before someone tells you that Canada is a just really a great country and that working hard and Tim Hortons are very important, y’all. In one song, Bentall describes as “just a travelling hobo in a boxcar on a lonely train — seems like no one, nobody really knows my name.” And on the very next track, he tells us that all he ever wanted to be was a cowboy on a movie screen, that this is actually the single thing Dustin Bentall ever wanted for his entire life. It may seem cruel to pull out such a literalist’s eyepiece — it’s only a song, after all. But what kind of song? Despite its mellow stride, and thanks to desperate cliché, the dreaded answer is unquestionably this: hot country. Dustin Bentall is making hot country.
Not exclusively, thank the Maker. The title track, which cleaves the album, has an exuberant jangle that feels like waking up with a boner. The echoey “Secrets” has a Wilco feel you’ll probably dig too, as does the concluding “Deserts of Our Minds.” A reverse parallel to his first album, this last song’s actually the best one, showing off Bentall’s dynamic voice, compositional verve, and lyrical maturity. Well, at least dessert was excellent.
***

Clint Mansell
Moon (original soundtrack)
This is one of the great science fiction scores: I knew it within seconds of Moon starting up in the Princess basement. Haunting, spare, precise, freezing, reverby piano — the choice is obvious, but the execution is superb.
In some ways, this tense and tragic suite, with its little sampled heartbeat indicators, bionic man SFX, and drifting electro guitars slowed down to an airless orbit, is so penetrating, it almost distracts you from the baby Bowie’s film. But I’m not going to criticize Mansell for doing too good a job. Perfect.
*****

OLD SCHOOL
Original Soundtrack
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Push away the camp for a second, the flying toast, pretty Susan Sarandon running around in her underwear — just listen to the actual music of Rocky Horror. The lyrics are insane nonsense, yes. But they’re sung so powerfully and genuinely, which I think is why we still remember Rocky Horror at all.
Richard O’Brien, who plays Riff Raff, is the writer, lyricist, and composer, and it’s amazing how deeply his bizarre coming-of-age-amid-transsexual-monsters cuts. The music swoons and writhes, fat with ’50s nostalgia and Alice Cooper shock, but over and over its characters are lined up and reduced to the trembling children that live inside every attention-seeking goth self-mutilator. Its gravity remains planetary.
*****