For Dommengang‘s third album for Thrill Jockey, it sounds as though they threw all their stuff into the back of the car and blew their LA home in favour of a wild ride into the desert, forsaking the concrete gleam for some dusty widescreen excesses. The scree of feedback that opens the album is a welcome reminder of their rock roots, but also that they are looking to push beyond that on No Keys.
The bruised croon, the cacophonous drums, the resonant and insistent bass, it all finds its place in the overall blueprint, but there is more to it than that. There is an equality to the sound, an egalitarianism that finds the three members always making space for one another in their own psych-rock landscape, which can only come from having spent a lot of time in one another’s company.
The sleepy vocals are a kind of antidote to the intensely heavy drums on “Earth Blues”, and the bass-line is resonant and hypnotic. It doesn’t sound much like blues to me, but I suppose it is blues reflected in twenty-first century influences and owes more to the desert-dwelling stoner rock types than it does to John Lee Hooker or The Bluesbreakers. Bass chords abound on “Wild Wash” and fairly burst out of the speakers. Dommengang are partial to a spot of heavy riffing and the odd incendiary guitar solo, but the band is not defined by these tropes and you feel that it is just an added texture, rather than something upon which to rely. “Blues Rot” offers an atmospheric night under the stars and is a little more strung out, with space for everybody to stretch and take a look around them, but lasts hardly any time and is almost like an aperitif before the start of the second side. These changes of tack give the album plenty of surprises and the flailing sound of “Kudzu”, with the taut snap of driving drums and juicy bass chords, sets side two off at a great pace. The instrumental “Arcularius-Burke” on the other hand shows their gentler, sparser side. With its soothing guitar, it could almost be a lullaby or as close as Dommengang come to such a thing, and the guitar is as expressive in Dan Wilson‘s hands as any vocals could be, turning it into an expansive widescreen wonder.The duet with Golden Void‘s Camilla Saufly-Mitchell is a lovely thing, but it is interesting to hear Wilson’s voice devoid of effects on album closer “Happy Death”. It sounds defenceless and intimate, and the soundscape behind it is full of distant, desert sounds and eerie organ from Adam Parks. This is the ultimate lost in the desert sound — as if after the initial rush to leave LA, the car is broken and full of dust and they have taken up residence, sleeping under sheets and embracing the wilderness with wolves wailing in the distance. It builds to a dramatic finale, but feels constantly as though it is questing, searching for something as yet unknown, and perhaps unknowable.
-Mr Olivetti-
