Gate – The Dew Line

1993 • Table of the Elements

There is an unfortunate fact concerning drone and lo-fi music: it can sometimes be very easy to make, which sadly results in a lot of really crappy music being churned out. Gate's The Dew Line is one of these albums, a lumbering, sloppy exercise in poor production that is a chore to listen to.

My distaste for this album is partially attributable to the fact that I find guitar-based drone and noise to be incredibly dull, and that's all you'll get on this album. The music alternates between very simple chord patterns and meandering noise, neither of which are interesting. For example, "Have Not" is thirteen minutes of the same two chords over and over, which slowly devolves into pointless, random notes. "Venerable Clouds" is an overlong improvisation over just a few notes. Every track has a different style and a different way of being played, but somehow not a single one of them works.

Making things worse is the total lack of timing or cohesion. Everything sounds very sloppy and nothing lines up at all, so when there are two instruments overlaid they often clash horribly. Even in non-rhythmic music it's important to make sure all of the instruments and sounds meld well, but here it's a mess. Guitar lines smash into each other, electronic noises sputter around aimlessly, and the vocals come and go without any respect for the music at all.

On that note, vocals are just one more thing this album didn't need, and they sound just as bad as everything else. With the singular exception of "Have Not", there seems to have been no actual effort put into them: no melody, no rhythm, no emotion, not even any apparent enthusiasm; it's just mumbled, uninterested groaning that cracks and stumbles its way through each song. It's almost embarrassing to listen to, and I can't imagine why anyone would have thought they were a good idea.

Of course I could be totally wrong about my interpretation of this whole album: perhaps it's an exercise in despair, a deliberate attempt to create a sound that is alienating and frustrating. If that's the case, then Gate was successful. Considering that I seem to be in the minority in disliking this album (albeit not a small minority) that could well be the case.

But I don't see The Dew Line that way; to me it's just unappealing. Fortunately the album is too subtle and uninteresting to be overly obnoxious or grating (at least most of the time) so it's not one of the worst things I've listened to, but it's definitely bad. Perhaps it's stomachable if ignored as background music but I wouldn't do that to myself on purpose.

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