Wielding familiar inventiveness and ingenuity LA Priest returns armed with more unorthodox earworms

Navigating between his home in North Wales, the south coast of England and California while recording this second entry under the LA Priest banner, Sam Dust’s existence has objectively, in a physical sense at least, occupied disparate terrain in the last year or so.

Stylistically speaking, the enigmatic songsmith continues to uphold the identity-blurring template first struck on Inji; a debut that wandered in nomadic abandon between disco, electronic and experimental frontiers. An avant-garde home that Dust further entrenched with 2016’s Soft Hair side-project, alongside Connan Mockasin, where the day-glo structures of nu-rave, much like the genre itself, felt like a distant, foggy memory.

Phantasy label founder and Dust’s long-term accomplice Erol Alkan returns to co-produce the latest in a partnership that dates back to Fantasy Black Channel days; both reliably in simpatico on GENE, governed as it is by subterranean beats in thrall to a glossy overarching finish. This blueprint circulates, at its most agile, via the febrile electro-funk finery of “What Moves”, an early highlight that carries the trickling off-beat allure that has spurred Dust’s renewed visibility of sorts in the last five years. A warped magic similarly saturates “Sudden Thing”, its off-the-grid thread of syrupy '70s strings yielding Country Life-era Roxy Music finesse, bound with intense lyrical imagery: “Falling in sunlight / Whirling / Eaten by parasites / To dance on a low tide / To bleed when the water’s high”. The David Sylvian-esque vocal pirouettes of “Beginning” and reggae-laced “What Do You See” prove additional curios on a track list that keeps traction for most of its forty-minute length.

Much like its predecessor, GENE fuses flights of accessibility in parallel with the unorthodox, achieving a split-tone depth that at once evokes a murky, warbling uneasiness and in equal measure boasts splashes of untroubled psych-pop brilliance. Earworms deployed in quick succession, Dust helms familiar inventiveness and ingenuity that can sometimes feel a rarity.