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Live Review: LA PRIEST 'Party Zute / Learning To Love'

4 May 2015 | 1:14 pm | Tom Hutchins

"if it doesn’t conform it’s because it’s not supposed to."

Earlier this year, Sam Dust aka Sam Eastgate aka LA PRIEST, emerged from what seemed like an eternity to release the first single from an upcoming album. Now we finally have the details from said album, as well as massive new single that takes the multi-instrumentalist back to his roots.

For those of you who somehow don't know Sam Dust as the frontman from cult/seminal weirdo's Late Of The Pier, I ask you to keep up and also do some homework on the effect that band has had on the world, because they were special.

To return to the present, thanks to Domino, Dust will be releasing his debut LP under the LA PRIEST guise on June 26. Entitled, Inji, the album will feature the previous cut 'Oino' as well as this new beauty 'Party Zute / Learning To Love'.

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The title may seem like two titles, and when listening to this groove-laden eight and half minute experiment in pop - it wouldn't be hard to assume that this might have begun as two different tracks. The first couple of minutes are built around a distorted tape loop, that is part house and part experimental sampling - before everything changes. It's a subtle change, but you'll know when it hits. Things continue on a loop styled groove, but the beat is switched, the samples become dark and Dust contributes some perfect love themed lyrics.

There is a brilliant bass line the sweeps in and out of the epic track, and with it you can draw similarities to his debut (and only other) release as LA PRIEST, 'Engine' - which was another groove based dance track he dropped back in 2007. Times may have changed, but Dust has continued his love affair with experimenting with dance music on this one.

I truly find it hard to describe the sounds used throughout any LA PRIEST track, but for 'Party Zute / Learning To Love' everything seems new. Every sound has been meticulously picked, broken down, rebuilt, experimented with and distorted before it's landed in the track, and that's the brilliance of this man. He's never played by the rules, and with the new life of LA PRIEST, Eastgate has applied the same frantically eclectic, mischievous and wilfully absurd spirit of Late Of The Pier.

After LOTP's hiatus was called in 2010, "Dust travelled the world, did scientific research, worked on the creation of a number of new inventions and produced several secret musical projects", and so it seems that Inji will be a record that has its own logic and exists in its own time zone. I've been informed by Domino to expect tracks that sounds nothing like 'Oino' or 'Party Zute...", and that's a wonderfully exciting thought.

Sam Dust is one of the most prolific artists of our time, but maybe no one else will see it, and that's okay - because "if it doesn’t conform it’s because it’s not supposed to."

Learn to love all over again with LA PRIEST's debut LP, Inji, out June 26 via Domino Recordings.

Words by Tom Hutchins

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