Italian outfit Dustineyes plays a strange mixture of punk, sleaze and heavy. It’s a confusing, but interesting sandwich of Guns n’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, The Gonads and oldschool hard rock bands like ACDC, seasoned with rhythm-and-blues. The Danish band D.A.D’s first couple of releases contained what was described as “Cow-punk” – and Dustineyes is not far from that. Compared to D.A.D Dustineyes are more punk and less cow...

To no-ones surprise the prime instrument here is the guitar, and Umberto Morra knows what he’s doing. Drums are ok, but nothing to marvel at. They are excellently tight but nothing more, backing the rest of the band. The bass drowns in bad production and this is where the shit hits the fan:

The production is muddy. It’s not a complete catastrophe, but it doesn’t exactly help. The band cant blame my rather tame rating on the sound techs, though.

Dustineyes doesn’t show nearly enough versatility to please me. The music rocks, but it never develops. It’s virtually impossible to sit still while Dustineyes are playing – but that goes for a lot of music. I’m simply not impressed.

The real problem is the lead singer, Emanuele Morra. In the beginning you think he’s up to the job. His voice sounds at least adequate on the first two or three tracks. I do not know how this album was recorded, but some thing tells me they were in a fuck of a hurry. Emanuele is tiring as the album progresses. I I’m tiring of his raw and sassy vocals – they turn into a total pestilence. What starts out as the charm of the album is overused and ends up as pissing me off.

On top of this the paratext stinks. I know my English is bad, but Dustineyes can’t write a complete sentence, let alone the lyrics of an entire album. We’re dealing with titles like “Beer, Whisky and Bar” and text passages like

“Sometimes monster try to rape our mind / For a few minutes increase insanity / You can resist or you can fight / And 1-2-3-4… Death Arrives”… What…? Luckily Emanuele can’t pronounce anything, so you wont notice unless you read the lyrics. 

Aside from bad language someone working on the art-design decided to rename some of the songs, but only on one part of the cover. Thus “Innocent Cries” (back cover) becomes “Innocent Crying” (inner sleeve), for example. The track-list below is taken from the back cover, and the weird errors are loyally cited. That same art-design guy should be hanged, by the way, for choosing a travesty of a front cover, while putting a very brutal picture on the CD itself.