It's a good thing for this album that Ellen Allien is in control of what gets released on the Bpitch Control label, had anyone else submitted this snooze-fest as a demo it undoubtedly would be rejected. Were Berlinette not in my personal top five or so faves of electronica albums of the last decade I probably wouldn't be so harsh, but Dust truly is a stinker.
Objectively Dust suffers from an identity crisis. It's an album molded to the pop format: 10 songs that average about 4.5 minutes each, but stylistically it's attempting to be a collection of music for the dancefloor: faithful beats with very little instrumentation and vocals. Subjectively Dust is plagued by compositions that are weak, bland, uninspiring, and forgettable. There's no hooks here: nothing to hold on to, and while that may work with the most minimal melodies, the tunes here are simply amateurish and dull: the album consists entirely of filler.
Preceding Allien's fifth solo full-length album are a couple singles.
