dean does reviews: DEJAGRAVY
Artist: DejaGravy
Album: Visitor
What can I say about Visitor other than it’s like great peanut butter? Crunchy, chunky, and best when smeared all over my bod- Wait a minute.
Jokes aside, if you’re not familiar with DejaGravy, they’re an experimental doom/stoner metal duo composed of Vater Boris and Ricky Hall. This album came out a few months ago. “Why’d it take you so long to review it?” Quite simply put, my car’s CD system couldn’t physically handle it. It got two tracks in before completely shitting itself (I put in another disc to see if it was my car, and well, it worked just fine. So we’re already going into this with five stars for knocking my little Civic on its ass).
Visitor is a Phish album, if Phish were made up of Cyberdemons from DOOM, and I absolutely love it. The length of tracks vary from one minute to a little over 14 minutes, with the longer ones being Hellish jam sessions, while the shorter ones are vignettes of pure insanity. Unlike most bands, DejaGravy isn’t exactly accessible to the masses, mostly because they’re playing experimental doom metal, but that’s what makes it so memorable. Their songs are repetitive, but in the best of ways; the way that marks a doom/sludge/stoner band who knows what the fuck they’re doing. Songs like “Carbuncle” are slow and grungy, as if you’re trudging through something that Paula Deen cooked up (it’s a butter joke), while the end of “Void” is fast, chaotic, and hectic.
“Real Eyes Realize Real Eyes” is haunting. The synth lines sound as if they’re lifted from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers or Psycho or someone’s third grade violin recital. It only gets more terrifying as the song progresses, though; to the point where you probably shouldn’t listen to it alone in the dark as I did the first couple of times.
If you’re a metalhead, fan of Romero, or just like really insane, artsy stuff, go listen to Visitor by DejaGravy. If not, still, go listen to Visitor by DejaGravy. Lord knows we all need some more excitement in our lives.
