“I told him, ‘If you’re too busy, then this is the band for you,’” laughs Clifford Dinsmore. “Because we don’t do shit!”
The singer is talking about when he asked guitar player Ed Gregor (ex-No Use for a Name/Hedgehog) to join doom-laden sludge metal act Dusted Angel. It’s a half-joke, half-truth. Locals in the heavy music scene should know the name Dusted Angel since they’ve been a band since 2008. However, in those 16 years the group has only put out one full-length and has a tendency to play sporadically—often only a couple times a year, if that.
Yet, all that has changed in the last two years.
Not only have they been playing more shows—like their gig on Nov. 15 at the Ritz in San Jose with headliners Fear plus the Hellflowers and Bukaki Blaster—but the band also has their second full-length, This Side of the Dirt, recorded and ready to be heard.
The band attributes this sudden push in creativity partially due to Dinsmore’s diagnosis of multiple myeloma—a form of bone marrow cancer—in 2021.
“I was getting a front-row seat of what he was going through,” Gregor says. “When he reached the other side—like the superhuman he is—and started building back his health I felt really inspired. So when he asked me to join the band [in 2022] I felt the urgency like ‘What am I doing with my life? I’m not playing and look what he’s going through.’”
Over the years Dusted Angel has had their fair share of setbacks. In 2013 Dinsmore was in a near fatal car accident that left him with a fractured sternum and a years-long, drawn-out recovery. The band hoped to record a new album in 2017 but that year Dinsmore received his first of two cancer diagnoses. Shortly after, co-founding member and ex-guitarist Scott Stevens learned he needed hand surgery.
“Dusted Angel fans put up with a lot,” Dinsmore says. “Now we have shirts but you used to not be able to buy a shirt or record at a show. Which worked for us in a weird way because people knew ‘Dusted Angel is playing, go see it now!’”
Stevens continued to have problems playing and eventually had to step down, opening up the position for Gregor to fill. Along with Dinsmore and Gregor, today’s Dusted Angel features Steve Ilse on drums, and co-founders Eric “Dog” Fieber and Eliot Young on guitar and bass, respectively.
It’s a lineup that has all of the stars aligned, just as the prophecy foretold—if there was one.
For starters, they’ve already played six shows this year alone, a huge feat for a band who is normally too busy with their actual lives. And then there’s This Side of the Dirt, which they recorded with Tim Green at Louder Studios in Grass Valley.
“For me it was a sense of urgency like, ‘What if I die and Dusted Angel doesn’t have representation of where we are at?’” Dinsmore remembers. “That created the motivation that this has to happen with the best representation of what Dusted Angel is.”
Gregor agrees, adding that the influence Green had on the album cannot be denied.
“What Tim did for the recording allowed Dog and I to open up and go back and forth bringing some of the guitar out,” he says. “Tim also dialed in our tones. He has a great ear and would say, ‘Can I tweak your amps?’ and we’d say ‘Go for it!’ So there’s a lot of clarity to every instrument that was drowned out in the previous recording.”
The band is currently shopping the album around to different labels in the hopes of getting the most distribution possible. It’s the first step in Dusted Angel holding more of a presence with underground metal heads.
“When I was [in Europe] it surprised me but people know Dusted Angel and asked when we were coming over,” Dinsmore says. “But without having something out, it just felt limited like, do we even want to play outside of the area without this record released?”
So for now, fans have a lot to look forward to as the band sheds their “too busy” ways with a new sense of urgency and purpose.
“I always thought, ‘Man, if this could happen in the right way, it would be really great,’” Dinsmore says. “And now I feel like we’re able to have that opportunity to do it for real.”
Dusted Angel plays Nov. 15 on a bill headline by Fear and also featuring the Hellflowers and Bukaki Blaster at the Ritz, 400 S. 1st St., San Jose, 408-982-3784. TIckets: $40.10+. theritzsanjose.com
