Heart Failure Research Unit

Heart Failure Research Unit, as a name, may sound cryptically connected to hospitals and healthcare. But as Even the Losers Get Lucky Sometimes will clarify, HFRU is brave exploration of folk and rock — tied together with bold lyrics of a troubadour. Headed by Calgary’s Dustin Anderson, HFRU pumps its way through up beat ballads and slow psych numbers. Even the Losers Get Lucky Sometimes offers wild recordings, supported by weary folk wanderings. The contrast between the album’s songs is mesmerizing. While offering clear insight into the end of love, HFRU tosses its emphasize from rhythm to ramblings, all while trying to reason with real emotion. As you are warmed and frozen by Even the Losers Get Lucky Sometimes, you will see that you are in delicate care — the intricacies of folk music are masterfully handled by Heart Failure Research Unit. - Argue Job

Dustin Anderson’s Heart Failure Research Unit brings us another record of inimitable control and beauty. Working together with wonder-producer, Lorrie Matheson, HFRU have crafted a cover to cover missive on the fragility of life. A glance at Mt. Hope‘s track titles gives you a good idea of the poetic aesthetic of this new album. Mt. Hope is something of a self aware dirge that for all its bemoaned inner-gazing cannot help but throw a redemptive light on every word it touches. It parades the songwriter’s strength in patience and compositional development, harnessing the power of his poems in the brevity and deliberation of his many fonts which slide smoothly in and out of the mix lending gravity to their subject. Another step in the right direction for the ever proliferating HFRU. - Argue Job

In a recent interview, one-man band and thus prime mover behind Heart Failure Research Project, Dustin Anderson said that his favorite venues were "old, creaky halls with hundred-year-old histories and rickety shanties. They have an amazing haunted quality." "Young Animals" sounds like it was recorded in just such a place, with Anderson roaming around the space, near and away from the mics and the instruments, according to which sound interested him in the moment. This is a haunting, folk-based ambient triumph, full of melodic invention and an oddly raw whimsy that is often moving.

Most of these songs are about presence, or the lack of it, or it memory. From the titles alone you get the idea: "Now You're Gone," "I'm Haunted," "I Am Here," for starters. Anderson haunts his own songs with muted vocals, muffled piano and guitar, odd tempos. But he never suggests defeat or sadness. Even songs like "Won't You Die" or "Frozen Heart" have a hidden joy to them that is stunning when explored overtly. Those instances, like on the title track and "We Are Ghosts," explode in color and melody, Anderson's vocals taking on a soaring moan. What is haunting these songs is not only memory and loss but rejuvenation and peace.

"Young Animals" is brilliant, rich and necessary. Alberta med student Dustin Anderson, in Heart Failure Research Unit, has a forum for healing as vital as wherever his degree will take him. - Music Emissions

At the end of last month, Dustin Anderson of the oddly named Heart Failure Research Unit took a break from preparing for his shows at Sled Island to talk about his latest album, Young Animals. Produced by Lorrie Matheson, Young Animals shows the potential in a man with many talents. One of these talents has him going to school full time, on top of eking out a music career.

“I just finished my PhD on Monday,” says the hardworking artist. “I’m actually in an MDPhD program. I’m training to be a clinician scientist: it’s a medical doctor and an academic doctor. I hate to give this analogy, but the best description that I can give to people is, you know that show House, on TV? It would be sort of someone like that, but far less interesting. I just finished my PhD on Monday and then I start medical school in late July.”

Even though he’s going to medical school, Anderson finds the time for music. He’s simply had to work it into his already full schedule, playing, recording and writing when he has the spare time. This results in the raw, rough-edged music of Young Animals. It’s definitely not the brash, over-produced nonsense that many artists find themselves trapped in.

“I write songs incredibly fast. And that might harm the songs in terms of I might put out more worse songs than better ones, but I just sort of adapted to fit music into my lifestyle. I don’t get to make records throughout the year, I have one week where I can make a record and I can write the songs, whereas some musicians might be able to make a record for months on end, put every little gidgit and gadget on top of it.”

Gidgits and gadgets aside, the album is full of what many people call “junkstruments”: broken instruments, hubcaps, basically anything that can either produce a strange noise on its own, or can be mastered to sound odd and off the beaten track.

“I think I literally put a blow-dryer up to a banjo string and made it wiggle, and it made this weird sound,” he laughs. “A lot of those weird sounds, you’ve got to give credit to Lorrie for making them happen, because I mean, he knows. We have an excellent working relationship, so he knows that I like to use weird sounds and building an atmosphere is equally important to me as the song. He knows how to make a lot of the noises. The whole record was done with acoustic instruments, so there was a lot of computational, weird stuff going on.”

The atmosphere of his music must indeed be important to Anderson, because his dream is to play at Knox United Church. Intensely quiet moments, combined with the acoustics of the building, and churches in general, create a unique playing experience.

“It just sort of gravitates towards that kind of atmosphere that I like,” he explains. “It’s a dream, it always has been, to kind of play those venues where there’s 1,000 people. There’s just a totally different energy with those kinds of shows. Especially when it gets pin-drop quiet, it’s kind of an amazing moment. So that’s what I kind of hunger for in life. It doesn’t happen that often, especially when you’re playing in bars. People are getting drunk and they want to talk and have fun, attempt to fornicate with the opposite sex. I’m all for that, and if I can be the background music for that, that’s great too.” - BEATROUTE

While it seemed like the rest of the city was at the BeatRoute Hangover Breakfast, Heart Failure Research Unit played a soft and beautiful set to the early-afternoon brunchers at the Ship and Anchor. The Calgary band’s music is despondent and gloomy - certainly not the way you’d think you’d want to kick- off a long day of rock ‘n’ roll. Yet somehow, after a late night and a pounding head, Heart Failure Research Unit’s quiet set was the perfect way to ease into the day. (SET) - BEATROUTE

For many musicians, the inspiration to pick up an instrument and put their experiences into song arrives so early on in their lives that musicality seems like a birthright — they are destined to play. But for local songwriter Dustin Anderson, music factored in so little in his early life that by the time he hit university he had never been to a single concert or owned a single album. His musical urge lay curiously dormant until his 20s and even then, it emerged very slowly. The journey from his first notable musical experience at a Hayden concert in university to his first album of whiskey-soaked indie-folk as Heart Failure Research Unit took almost a decade.

“I wanted to have an awesome singing voice and be awesome at guitar, but I just had the worst singing voice,” Anderson recalls. “I had no idea what rhythm was or what pitch was or what anything was, and I had no one to show me, so it just went on from there... I learned a basic strumming pattern and started writing potentially the worst songs ever written on the planet. I wrote a bunch of them.”

At 26, Anderson moved East from his home in Vancouver to start a second degree in bio-science at the University of Calgary, playing a few open mics around the city as he had done for the past few years on the coast, something he describes as “the most soul-sucking experience.” But at one particular songwriter’s night at the Ironwood, Anderson’s smokey voice and understated pop hooks drew the attention of Lorrie Matheson, elder statesman of the local folk-rock and weirdo music scene, leading to a musical partnership that left the open mics behind to enter the magical world of studio recording.

“(Lorrie) loved this one particular song of mine, and said ‘We’ve got to talk about making record,’ and that was it,” Anderson recalls. “My musical education went through the roof.”

“The first record we did, Ghostlove, was a horrendous experience,” he continues. “By that time I had a better idea of how to sing in key, but to play in the studio is such a different thing. It was really rough.”

As humbling as the recording process had proved the first time around, it didn’t take long for Anderson to make plans to return to the studio with Matheson in the fall of 2010 for a second album, entitled Young Animals, that will be released this Saturday with a performance at the Arrata Opera Centre. Although he had spent many years playing and writing alone, the exposure to Matheson’s experimental tendencies in the studio mixed with his own ambition to be unconventional led Anderson to abandon the tried-and-true solo performer paradigm for something a little more left of centre.

“I hate, absolutely despise, the guy-and-his-guitar stuff, unless it’s out-of-hand good,” says Anderson. “For the most part, it’s boring to watch a guy sit there and play his guitar for an hour-and-a-half, even if he’s a phenomenal guitar player. I don’t want a record like that ever. I don’t want this stripped down 13-song thing, I want it to be fucking weird, but I still want it in that medium, so we said let’s see if we could do it.”

At the outset of recording, the two decided to create unique conditions for these new batch of recordings in which they would only use acoustic instruments and a minimal amount of studio effects to produce the sounds for the record. The result is a fully grown, dynamic and mature pop record, one that feels like a perfectly organic setting for Anderson’s hushed folk songwriting, but also provides a varied sonic pallet that consistently engages the listener — eccentricities that perfectly accent Anderson’s self-taught songwriting style. - FFWD

Calgary's Dustin Anderson has an innate sense of subtlety. His newest record, Young Animals, is a collection of foggy folk songs that tend to linger in ethereal ambiance until emerging fully formed and then sinking back into vapour. Though his voice is not his strongest suit, Anderson manages to inject it with the same elusive quality that the rest of Young Animals evinces. This quality is also owing to Lorrie Matheson's inspired production. The musical choices are constantly interesting and alluring without forfeiting a sense of beauty. Anderson is a neuroscience PhD, but he's no less a scholar of the heart. - Vue Weekly

HFRU , the pseudonym of one Dustin Anderson, has crafted his second album around the theme of loss and departure. He and his collaborators have opted to record this album entirely acoustically. However, they have been immensely creative in taking that route, as most of the myriad sounds on here are frazzled, echo-laden, atmospheric and, well, just plain weird. They also occasionally reach the haunting sound they are aspiring to.

In a record where dreams and ghostly imagery feature heavily, opener ‘I am Here’ hums to itself, as if to remind the world it hasn’t quite departed, before Anderson confesses in his cracked voice “Im in love with your ghost...”. The swooning ballad ‘Now You’re Gone’ sleepwalks along as if it’s too heartbroken to carry on, but upping the ante further, the superb title track ‘Young Animals’ pounds along with Whiskeytown-esque melodies and complimentary female harmonies. Achingly, it’s several minutes too short.

In amongst the alt-country and folk sounds on offer, the clanking and hissing of ‘Has the World Gone Mad’ shows they’ve probably heard a Tom Waits album or 3 between them, but there are moments, both the good and not so good, that feel a little under-developed. ‘We are Ghosts’ grows into a near football crowd-sized chant of the title, but there’s not much of a song underpinning the bluster. Similarly on ‘Wake Me From My Dream’ things suddenly drift off and sound frustratingly like fragments of song, not yet concluded. An unsatisfying feeling derived from a number of the tracks here.

‘Young Animals’ is quite a disjointed and fragmented record. It certainly has its moments of confounding, bleary-eyed beauty, and they've shown that an entirely acoustic record can still be boundless in terms of creativity and atmosphere, which they should be applauded for. ‘Young Animals’ isn’t their magnum opus but it will be interesting to see what they can conjure up on future releases.
- Americana UK

Calgary’s Dustin Anderson and his nom de guerre Heart Failure Research Unit forced me into a serious double take last week on CJSR. I grabbed this random gem off the hot wax pile and plugged it in to find that every song demanded a spin. That’s when picking one gets painful. Thankfully, Mr. Anderson has recently uploaded the album to Bandcamp for us all to stream and purchase and revel in. His folk canticles are full of the breeziest of production choices, air in the room, air in the guitars, air in his voice. As if inundated by the breath of God, each stroke of each song floats to heavenly heights. Deceptively, the production is actually as busy and florid as it is tastefully subdued. Fans of folk canticles in general need to get at this right now. P.S. Dustin Anderson is also in the middle of a phD in neuroscience so he’s also smart like that too. What a catch! - Argue Job

Truth be told, when I got an email from Dustin of Heart Failure Research Unit I actually thought it was from one of the medical sites I monitor as a result of my son’s heart condition. I opened it, and reading about a a young Calgary resident and super musician/sound man Lorrie Matheson working together thoroughly confused me. So did the mention of a guest appearance from Rueben Bullock.



HFRU is the cryptic moniker for singer / song writer Dustin Anderson, a PHD student that prefers obscure textures and off-kilter vocals to standard chord progressions and soaring harmonies. Sonic exploration is equally as important, maybe more so in fact, than melody and on his latest LP, Young Animals. Acoustic textures, clanging hand percussion and junkstruments (I think I hear hubcaps on a few tracks) all come together to create Dustin’s own brand of isolated, moody,rustic noise. Dustin’s vocals often drift into that borderline off-pitch, Hayden-inspired eccentricity and when he gets it right (“Won’t You Die”, the piano laced “Now You’re Gone” and the touching “Love Me My Dear”) it works well, but unfortunately, when it isn’t backed by a strong melody, some of the limitations of his voice threaten to derail the listen.



Young Animals is aptly named. It’s got drive and ambition, but probably needs time to fully develop into adulthood. Dustin’s certainly on the right path; if you cherry-picked tracks for a playlist the results hold up nicely (especially some of the more uptempo melodies like “Young Animals” and “When You Were a Kid” that remove the haze). I just think he’s at least one LP away from finding his niche and harnessing the creativity and experimentation to create a more complete listen. - Herohill

Don't listen to Young Animals if you are driving a car and maybe not even while riding a bike, unless it comes with a bell, over-sized handle bars and you are wearing a helmet. Otherwise, when you drive off a cliff out of pure anxiety, you may indeed be hurt. The album is like sitting through a horror movie, waiting for something terrifying to happen, the important climax. The thing is, it never does.

The music begins to build, slowly -- the baritone becomes louder every second and your nails dig into your chair. You cover your eyes and peak out through the holes between your fingers ready for something, anything, to jump out at you. Usually it does and the anxiety is rewarded, but not on Young Animals.

The thirteen-song album meanders over a similar beat throughout, but ultimately lacks that exciting punch to draw you in, keep you listening and paying attention.

If you listen to it a few times so you know what to expect, then you might come to enjoy Young Animals steady, simple and sedentary flow. Just don't hope for anything more than a few foot taps and head nods after the first listen. - The Gauntlet

Calgary-based Dustin Anderson is pretty much a one-man shop. Not only is he the singer and songwriter behind Heart Failure Research Unit, but the musician also provides guitars, banjos and harmonicas (with percussion assistance from Shigeki Tsutsui). His self-released 'young animals' is a haunting affair, with a quiet undercurrent of disparity between the lines, guided by an organic if not downright rustic tenor. Anderson¹s voice takes some getting used to: He is at times acutely off-pitch, hoarse or wailing, while a cacophony of rootsy instrumentation conjures an image of that oddball sitting on the street corner determined to share a message that is
either utterly mad or covertly genius. The songs on 'young animals' offer varying degrees of impact. 'I Am Here' devotes nearly 2 minutes to a curious pained moan before kicking into the best melody of the set. 'Wake Me From My Dreams' is barely audible, a sonic horror show, with a sweet folk anthem buried underneath; too bad it's impossible to hear. Likewise, 'Frozen Heart' is an intriguing slice of Americana, but Anderson's low-pitch mumble makes the vocal a near complete loss; while 'I Am Haunted' is a hodge-podge of tracked vocals, sometimes blending but as often competing for harmonic unity. 'We Are Ghosts' ends things on a promising note, as Anderson layers his vocals into a powerful chorus that sounds like shouting from the mountaintop. And the dark imagery of his lyric is equally effective, as he sings, 'All we are is hungry wolves with bloody mouths and bloody paws/Our hearts filled with the things we have lost.' There's a certain shabby chic to Heart Failure Research Unit that likely comes off better in a live setting than on this aural ordeal. Back to the drawing board for Anderson and his Heart Failure Research Unit.

- Billboard Discoveries

Out of Calgary comes Heart Failure Research Unit with this independent release ‘Ghostlove’. It is hard to tell you about the band as there is very little information but it would seem that Dustin Anderson is the sole creator who uses a collection of musicians for this album.

The whole record gently saunters along led by clearly very accomplished acoustic guitar playing, whispering vocals and an ever present earthy atmosphere. ‘Skeleton Car’ and ‘Wrecking Ball’ take on a harder, gruff vocal which lends a small amount of diversity to the record very nicely. Whether this is a different vocalist or Anderson after smoking 50 cigarettes is difficult to tell.

The songs are reasonably straight forward which paint great images and tend to bounce along with a rustic rhythm, you can lose yourself in this. Throughout you get glimpses of very beautiful piano parts and complementing harmonicas, particularly on ‘Deadbirds’ there is what sounds like an old pump organ which haunts the entire track.

‘Ghostlove’ feels like it has been inspired by The Low Anthem’s ‘...Charlie Darwin’, or certainly has some kind of fond relationship with it. This is a very pure record which has an antique presence, almost like it needs to be lovingly preserved. - Americana UK

HEART FAILURE RESEARCH UNIT
By Mark Wong

Dustin Anderson, a transplant from Campbell River, BC, is a busy man as a one-man band, Heart Failure Research Unit. On top of preparing a release of his fully independent CD Ghostlove, playing shows around the city and recording a second album, he’s aiming for a PhD/MD from the University of Calgary. Having just recently opened for Old Man Luedeke, Anderson is getting ready for some more shows during the month of May, including the CD release of Ghostlove at the Marquee Room. There’s also a yet-to-be-announced benefit at the New Black, which “is one of my favourite venues, it’s like a recording studio as well,” according to Anderson. Sitting down with him in a busy Nellie’s, he shares his insight on venues, experimental folk and unique band names.

“My favourite kind venues are old, creaky halls with hundred-year-old histories and rickety shanties. They have an amazing haunted quality.” HFRU’s sound seems well suited to these venues, with mellow harmonics and optimistic lyrics, carried with a slight rasp in Anderson’s voice. With inspirations from Califone, Damien Jurado and Lorrie Matheson, the similarity of strong lyrics and subdued melodies comes forth in his music. As a result, Anderson strays away from playing bars and prefers more of a “shut up and listen” performance atmosphere; venues like the Marquee Room, Grace Presbyterian Church and the Jubilee Auditorium are more his style. His dream is to play at Knox United Church. “If I could play (Knox United Church), I would play and then quit playing music right afterward. I like that kinda churchy sound.”

Anderson started when he picked up a guitar and started teaching himself by reading chord books and internet articles. After a seraphic meeting with Lorrie Matheson while he was playing a songwriter’s workshop at the Ironwood Stage in Inglewood, Anderson started his musical career. Since that day, Matheson has been a huge influence on his sound and is currently producing his next album. For the next album, he wants to incorporate unconventional bits into his songs. Using Califone as an example, he explains, “They have things like guitar tracks playing backwards and kettles going off and birds chirping.” The sound could be considered a bit of experimental folk or acid folk, with similarities to Frank Zappa.

The name “Heart Failure Research Unit” was taken from a sign off an old ward at the Foothills Hospital. “There was an actual Heart Failure Research Unit at one time and that’s exactly where I got the band name,” he remembers. The album cover for Ghostlove is a photo of the actual door. Unfortunately, that ward has since been torn down, leaving only the photograph behind, so it seems that the band name will likely keep its uniqueness. “I had another band called the Deadbirds,” he recounts, “but there’s already a Norwegian death metal band named the Deadbirds.”

With dreams of being lucky enough to be able to be a full-time musician, Dustin seems content with keeping his art on the side while focusing on his schooling. If he doesn’t become a famous artist, at least he’ll be a doctor. - BeatRoute