Album review: L.S. Dunes – Violet

Hope can feel in short supply. It certainly seemed to be on L.S. Dunes’ full-length debut, 2022’s Past Lives, an album born during the COVID-19 pandemic and fathered by members of My Chemical Romance (Frank Iero), Thursday (Tim Payne and Tucker Rule), Coheed & Cambria (Travis Stever) and Saosin/Circa Survive (Anthony Green), initially operating under the working title ‘Dad Bods’. It was a labour of love, even if the results were characterised by feelings of darkness and negativity.

This follow-up is something of a course correction with regards to outlook. Perhaps because the band’s members have unmoored themselves from the weight of expectation their constituent day jobs invite, as Frank suggested in the band’s recent K! Cover Story, but things feel more positive, or open to positivity, on Violet – albeit in a night-is-always-darkest-before-the-dawn kind of way.

On the album’s title-track, for instance, Anthony sings ‘You’re going to get what you deserve’. But where once this would have been delivered ominously, even threateningly, this time it’s with a loving recognition of someone’s worth. Later, Forgiveness provides a gleaming apology that ends things on a cathartic high point, seemingly clearing the slate of conscience for what comes next.

Admittedly, things don’t necessarily always sound more upbeat. There is, after all, a track called You Deserve To Be Haunted, which is a hell of a thing to wish upon someone, though its title may as well be addressing the listener given its status as an eerie earworm.

Much of the responsibility for Violet not being the most obviously sunny offering sits with Anthony, whose voice is a lilting, androgynous instrument – though it’s a chirrup that can turn abrasive at the drop of hat (or a chorus), as on Fatal Deluxe and Paper Tigers. But it’s just one element of a band with a curious alchemy, an ensemble of stylistic contrasts, pulling together to make a record of understated pleasures.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Thursday, My Chemical Romance, Beware Of Darkness

Violet is released on January 31 via Fantasy

Read this: L.S. Dunes: “Making music together is an intimate relationship. We’re not f*cking, but we are giving each other all of our selves”