According to Nick Foreman from the Eugene band Dust Congress, we’re living in “garbage time,” a sports expression for when the score is so lopsided that the remaining game play hardly counts. Garbage Time is also the title of Dust Congress’ excellent new album, a collection of idiosyncratic lo-fi indie folk blending voice and guitar with occasional light percussion and unique instrumentation including marimba, clarinet and horns. Foreman’s voice recalls John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats or possibly Jeff Mangum from Neutral Milk Hotel. Like those bands, his slow-core songs are cynical, bitterly funny and lyrically dense. Foreman calls it “outsider folk” and describes the sound as “depressive realism,” or music for “chasm gazers.” The band started in Denton, Texas — Foreman maintains a lineup there — and has only recently started playing out in Eugene with what he calls a “western branch” of musicians. To Foreman’s somewhat sarcastic “garbage time” point, he means environmental and political issues. We’re alive, he says, “at a time when the Earth seems like it’s dying or in decline,” and songs were inspired by “how people deal or don’t deal with that reality.” Also on the album, he channels his gallows humor into love songs about things like “how my wife should have listened to her friends and not gotten together with me,” and his friend’s relatable need for solitude. “Like, ‘I’m just going to go drink in a parking lot because that’s how I practice self-love, in isolation from other people,’” Foreman says. 

Dust Congress celebrates Garbage Time with Eugene’s Baroque Betty opening 7:30 pm, Friday, Oct. 17, at Art House, 492 East 13th Avenue. Tickets are $18 in advance and $20 day of show. They are available at EugeneArtHouse.com. The concert is all-ages. The band will perform in front of a video montage Foreman edited from San Francisco’s Prelinger Archives, with old home videos, government PSAs and the like.