Dry Heeves

Originally from Cape Breton but currently making their home in Edmonton, the Dry Heeves are a duo who take a whole bunch of musical instruments, styles and other assorted sounds and throw it at the wall to see what sticks. The result is Everything’s Gone Pseudo. The band have been around for close to 20 years, messing around with all kinds of weirdness. During that time, they’ve garnered airplay around the world and have even released an album exclusively in Russia, and it isn’t too hard to hear why they might have such universal appeal. The easiest way to describe what they do would be world music, but only in the way that they use samples from every source imaginable resulting in a cultural mixture, which means the album is always aurally interesting. Unfortunately, sometimes the blend gets really cluttered because there is so much going on, and the clash between the different sounds can be overwhelming. But maybe that’s the whole idea. If so, they success admirably. There’s no doubt that there are all kinds of ambitious ideas on Everything’s Gone Pseudo, but as an album, it is all over the place. And I can’t decide if that is a good thing or not. It certainly isn’t boring, but it isn’t always as entertaining as the band would like to think it is.