The Rubs - 2022 - Dust

 

HoZac Records – HZR-220

Dust is the third full-length by The Rubs, but the plural name is almost a joke. The album was written, composed and performed entirely by Joey Rubbish, turning the project into a one-person power-pop machine with enough hooks to make the record feel much bigger than its personnel list suggests. Released in 2022 after a five-year gap from Impossible Dream, Dust arrives with eleven songs and roughly forty-four minutes of music that sound deeply familiar without feeling dead. The references are obvious and proudly worn: late-’60s Kinks, Nick Lowe, Rockpile, the Real Kids, the Toms, the Plimsouls, Thin Lizzy, the Everly Brothers. But the album does not simply raid old styles. It understands why those records worked in the first place. Melody comes first, guitar lines keep moving, harmonies arrive at exactly the right moment, and almost every song contains some little turn that makes it worth hearing again.

“I Want You” opens the record by immediately establishing the scale of Rubbish’s ambition. This is not the kind of power pop obsessed with keeping everything under three minutes. The song stretches past four, allowing the arrangement to breathe and the hooks to stack rather than simply flash by. The guitar work is bright without becoming brittle, and the vocal melody has that old AM-radio quality where a phrase seems obvious only after someone has already written it. Dust repeatedly produces that feeling. The songs sound like things that somehow should have existed already. That is one of the strange pleasures of really good revivalist pop: it can feel less like invention than discovery.

“Dana” continues in that mode, leaning harder into romantic immediacy. The Rubs are not afraid of directness. Titles like “I Want You,” “I Don’t Wanna Wait,” “Hang On To Me” and “When I Dream About You” could belong to records from almost any decade of guitar pop. Nothing is hidden behind layers of abstraction. Desire is desire. Waiting sucks. Dreams matter. Somebody wants somebody else to stay. The sophistication is in the construction rather than the vocabulary. Rubbish takes those elementary emotional materials and arranges them with enough melodic intelligence that they never feel generic.

“Here In My Dream” is one of the clearest examples of the record’s softer side. Dust can hit with crunchy guitars, but it is equally comfortable drifting into something more suspended and wistful. The title already announces the album’s recurring fascination with dream states, distance and emotional projection. The arrangement lets that feeling hover rather than forcing it into a dramatic climax. This is where the Kinks and Everly Brothers comparisons become especially useful. The record often values grace as much as impact.

“I Don’t Wanna Wait” snaps back into something more urgent. Again, the title is blunt enough to sound almost primitive, but the song is built with care. Power pop lives or dies on the difference between repetition and insistence, and Rubbish understands that difference. A good refrain should become more satisfying every time it returns. Dust is full of refrains that seem to know exactly how long they can stay before turning irritating, then disappear just in time.

“Sleepin’” closes the first side and is the longest song on the album at over five and a half minutes. That length matters because it gives Dust room to escape the stereotype of power pop as a genre of tiny sugar explosions. Rubbish is interested in melody, but he is not trapped by economy. The song can stretch, wander and allow instrumental passages to take up more space. HoZac’s own description mentions both guitar and mellotron solos, and that is a useful clue to the record’s wider palette. This is not just guitars doubled left and right with a chorus in the middle. Dust keeps slipping small production and arrangement details into the songs, broadening the sound without losing the basic rock-and-roll skeleton underneath.

“Yer Trouble” opens the second side with a title that sounds almost tossed off, but the song continues the album’s careful balance between scrappiness and precision. Rubbish’s approach is DIY in the literal sense, yet Dust never sounds like a bedroom demo accidentally promoted into an album. The performances are controlled. The harmonies are intentional. The guitar parts interact rather than simply pile up. The one-man-band fact becomes more impressive the longer the record plays because there is no obvious weak link where a hired specialist might have been needed.

“What Did I Do?” is another four-minute pop song that refuses to hurry. The title introduces a little self-recrimination into an album otherwise dominated by desire and longing. One of Dust’s strengths is that the emotional range remains narrow enough to feel coherent without becoming monotonous. These are mostly songs about relationships, attraction, confusion and the difficulty of letting go, but the tone shifts constantly inside that territory. Sometimes the singer is reaching outward. Sometimes he is waiting. Sometimes he is blaming himself. Sometimes he is simply stuck inside the same thought.

“Hang On To Me” is where the Thin Lizzy comparison becomes most obvious. The guitars take on that harmonized, climbing quality associated with Lizzy’s classic twin-lead sound, but the effect is folded into The Rubs’ pop sensibility rather than turning into hard rock cosplay. The song feels expansive while remaining melodic. That ability to borrow a recognizable guitar language without letting it swallow the song is one of Rubbish’s better tricks. The influence becomes another color rather than the entire painting.

“Waste Of Time” is the shortest track and almost functions as a reset before the final stretch. At under three minutes, it comes closest to the traditional power-pop ideal of getting in, delivering the hook and leaving before anybody has time to complain. By this point the album has already demonstrated that brevity is a choice rather than a limitation. Dust can make a two-minute song or a five-minute song and still sound like the same project.

“The Same Thing To Me” brings the record back toward its emotional center. There is something almost fatalistic in that title, the recognition that different situations can end up producing the same emotional result. The song fits beautifully with the album’s larger sense of romantic repetition. Wanting, waiting, dreaming, hanging on, realizing that things keep arriving at the same destination. Dust is not a concept album, but its vocabulary creates a loose internal world where emotional patterns keep repeating the way choruses do.

“When I Dream About You” closes the album by returning explicitly to dreaming. That makes the sequence feel more deliberate than a simple pile of songs. “Here In My Dream” appears early, “When I Dream About You” ends the record, and the songs between them keep circling the gap between what is wanted and what is actually happening. The closing track does not need to resolve that tension. Power pop rarely does. The genre thrives on unresolved wanting because wanting is what generates the hook in the first place.

Dust was recorded after The Rubs had shifted from Chicago toward Kansas City, and HoZac’s description frames the album as the result of several years of change and reconfiguration. That history does not make the record sound unsettled. Quite the opposite. Dust feels unusually sure of what it wants to be. The songs are simple without being careless, polished without becoming sterile, nostalgic without sounding embalmed. There is no attempt to modernize power pop by smothering it in contemporary production tricks. The record trusts guitars, melody, harmony and rhythm because those ingredients still work.

That confidence is probably the key to Dust. Plenty of bands can reproduce the surface characteristics of older pop records. The harder thing is reproducing their emotional efficiency. The best Kinks, Nick Lowe or Real Kids songs do not sound clever because they contain complicated ideas. They sound clever because every part arrives exactly where it should. Dust has that same instinct. A backing vocal appears and suddenly the chorus opens. A guitar harmony enters and the song lifts. A melody repeats once more than expected and becomes permanent.

There is also something refreshing about hearing a record this committed to pleasure. Dust is not embarrassed by catchiness. It does not bury its hooks under irony or distortion to prove that the songs are serious. The album understands that making somebody want to hear a chorus again is already a serious accomplishment. Pop music can be simple without being stupid, familiar without being redundant, and emotionally direct without being shallow.

That is why Dust works so well despite sounding like it could have been made almost anywhere between 1978 and 2022. The album is not chasing historical accuracy. It is chasing the feeling those records created: the moment when a chord change lands perfectly, a harmony locks into place, and a song suddenly feels bigger than the room it was recorded in.

Eleven songs later, the dust settles.

The hooks stay.