DOMADORA – The Violent Mystical Sukuma

There are moments in everyone's life when the one and only thing our bodies need is to switch off our thoughts, pause the chaotic flowing of events we call life and start to meditate in order to reconcile with ourselves. And what could be a better time to listen to the new release of Domadora? The French band, with its latest work "The Violent Mystical Sukuma", ensures us a dose of morphine to relieve the pain induced by the suffering of our existence, a LSD trip that detaches the listener from reality and throws him/her into an alternative dimension in which dreams get distorted and amplified, where life stops to need to meaning, even though it's just for a while.

The great advantage possessed by music consists in being a language itself, which implies that it doesn't necessarily need to be accompanied by words and lyrics, and this is a distinctive characteristic of the band. In fact, the few times we'll be hearing some singing, it's going to be some kind of far and distant voices, echoing and harmonizing and overlapping each other in the mind of the listener, as if they were but sequences of sounds needless to be deciphered; as if they had no communicative aim but being resounding echoes into a psychedelic frame. And the word «psychedelic» has to be kept in mind to fully understand this disc, to get the best from its listening.

From a more strictly musical point of view, we're facing a uniform and well organised work, made up of six adequately combined tracks of different lengths. Some of them are built and arranged as if they were jam sessions ("Hypnosis"), whereas others seem to be closer to less experimental song structures (for example "Indian Depression" and "Rocking Crash Hero"). The work made by the guitars, with riffs and lead parts sometimes seemingly coming from the sixties-seventies and other times inspired by Nineties' Stoner, is accomplished in a fine way, looking for example at the instrumental "Solarium". The six strings' solos do never risk to create a hole into the wall of sound of the songs, such as into "Girl With A Pearl Earring", due to the presence of a rich and sharp bass alternating clean and distorted sounds. Drum lines and fills, on the other hand, keep minimal without being boring: they bear and guide the trio through different time changes, marking both the calm and the wild moments, which assures to the composition a certain fluency even in the longest songs ("Solarium" and "Jack Tripping") so that it has that extra oomph.

This is a truly charming work, indeed, that can be appreciated by both dreamers and the ones that look for music to keep themselves focused and help them thinking, without giving up that mark of rebellion against stillness and immobility which identifies for examples the sound of the Alternative wave of the Metal panorama. So, whether you like Led Zeppelin, Blue Öyster Cult or A Perfect Circle, this album won't let you down!