Duster recorded part of its 1998 debut, Stratosphere, with Phil Ek, a Pacific Northwest producer who by then had built up some significant credits, having worked with the likes of Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, and Earth. But Stratosphere turned out to be commercially earthbound, so the decision was made to stick around Duster’s hometown of San Jose for the band’s second record, 2000’s wryly dubbed Contemporary Movement. Their headphones were bad, their amps were idiosyncratic, and their tape supply wasn’t dependable. Yet the dozen songs that emerged from those piecemeal sessions were both richer and tighter than anything found on Stratosphere. The members of Duster, it seemed, had found their sound—and found a way to get it at home. Duster bowdlerized much of its slow-motion abstraction for Contemporary Movement, coiling it into songs that had more grit and more pronounced hooks. In four minutes, the opening track, “Get the Dutch,” moves from Fender Rhodes twinkle to fist-clenched exasperation. “Diamond,” meanwhile, ebbs and flows like a concise piece of post-rock, with Canaan Dove Amber singing exquisitely of ennui and ambition over barely there drums—as though stuck in an endless loop where very little actually happens. Contemporary Movement, like its predecessor, failed to push Duster toward careerism or bigger audiences. Despite the ironic title, it did have something to do with popular currents. The ricocheting guitars and discordant harmonies of “Travelogue,” plus the yawped pleas of the tremendous “The Breakup Suite,” weren’t too distant from Modest Mouse. And it was released within months of Coldplay’s “Yellow,” which shared its arcing romanticism and beautiful melancholy with “Everything You See (Is Your Own).” Imagine some circa-millennium contemporary rock doused in Dilaudid, and you get close to Contemporary Movement. Duster simply drifted apart in the years to come, disbanding into side projects and life, until online communities demanded their return by sheer force of will and enthusiasm, nearly two decades later.