Today at the Send Me Your Ears studio, we’ve been listening to the debut single from Calgary (Canada) band, The Dust Collectors. Take A Dive is a folk-rock track that the band describe as being “made for boot stomping and beer-spilling cheers”.
Songwriter Luke Giblin drew inspiration from various stories of 1920s Irish immigrants in America who made a living prize-fighting and sometimes fixing boxing fights through the Mob.
With a band name like The Dust Collectors, we had an idea in our heads of how they’d sound before we’d even hit play, and they did not disappoint! From the first guitar strum, you know exactly what you’re going to get.
With a Mumford and Sons style acoustic guitar pattern, this is a song that gets under your skin and makes you want to get up and dance. We love how it develops with kick and bass to fill the sound out perfectly.
The harmonies in the chorus give Take A Dive a slightly sea-shanty feel, and if we didn’t know better, we’d think this Calgary band were either from Ireland or Newfoundland!
The instrumentation in the track is authentic for the genre, and we love the use of single notes on the violin to help build the track and fill the sound in your ears.
This is a track which has some superb development – from the addition of the kick and bass in that all-important second verse to the glorious harmonies in the chorus, you cannot help but be swept along by the positive vibes of this track. The addition of extra percussion by the third verse keeps Take A Dive moving along beautifully and the whole song is wrapped up in under 3 minutes with a stinger-style ending.
Most definitely a candidate for college and folk radio in Canada. We have no doubt that CKUA in Alberta will support this track, alongside plenty of other college radio across Canada. This song will go down a storm on the East Coast.
From a production perspective, we feel that a boost around 180Hz would fill out the low end nicely and add to the overall warmth in the track. The vocal track could use a couple of cuts at around 650Hz and again around 1.5kHz to reduce the occasional ‘boxy’ and honky’ tones. Finally a high shelf boost in the top two octaves would add to the brightness and clarity. It’s worth mentioning too that although the stereo in the track sounds great, mixing down to mono would result in a great deal of phase cancellation, particularly in the acoustic guitar heard in the intro, virtually removing it from the track. We’d recommend The Dust Collective try flipping the phase on one side of the guitar track just to check for future tracks.
An exhilarating folk-rock ride of thorough enjoyment, The Dust Collectors have created a song which sounds both timeless and fresh, all wrapped up in one super-catchy and enjoyable track. We look forward to hearing more from this superb Calgary-based band.