Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Purchasable with gift card
$9USD or more
Cassette + Digital Album
A limited edition snapcase box that contains the entire "Dumesday Book" album on two cassettes (blue and green shells), each tape housed in a full-color slipcase, accompanied by a revised album booklet, a Darsombra sticker, a pair of Darsombra 1" badges, a digital download of the album, and more.
Includes unlimited streaming of Dumesday Book
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
One of my all-time favorite Maryland bands, Darsombra blasted out of the ionosphere in 2023 with their amazing, sprawling double-album Dumesday Book. I've loved everything that Darsombra has done, going all the way back to founder Brian Daniloski's early doom-drone version of the band. That first appeared in the mid-2000s with crushing, trance-inducing albums like Ecdysis and Eternal Jewel, issued by the fantastic local labels At A Loss and Public Guilt, respectively. Those early Darsombra works were awesome, megalithic monuments of crushing ambient doom (seemingly inspired by the sound and feel of Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions-era Earth), swirling experimental electronics, and kosmsiche-influenced riff-scape repetition - that stuff still holds up as some of the heaviest metallic psychedelia of that period. But at some point, starting with the 2012 album Climax Community, Brian began taking the band's sound into even further depths of lysergic energy and shroomed-out axe-drone, blending in newfound folk and noise elements into his sound, as well as stunning multi-tracked choral voices that made the band sound like angelic choirs howling over gargantuan tectonic plate-shift. Amazing stuff.
And with each new album, Darsombra continued to evolve into something even more unique, more immense, and most of all, more beautiful. And over the past decade, the band moved further afield into a style and space totally its own, impossible to categorize, carving out massive slabs of exploratory space-rock guitar alongside those blasts of distorted guitar crunch, stacking the vocals and electronics higher and higher with insane effects-pedal circuits. Things really took a turn towards the ultra-majestic when Brian teamed up with Ann Everton, who had already provided Darsombra with its strikingly cosmic-looking artwork; the first recording of the duo, 2016's Polyvision, blew my gourd off with its eerie, explosive dronescapes and synth-drenched roars of interstellar ambient sludge. This expanded vision did away with anything resembling the "doom"-iness of the early work, there was no feeling of doom here, just a kind of ghostly, soaring beauty that would build forever before going supernova with massive crescendos of voice, synth, and guitar.
From there, the duo became more and more ecstatic in their almost ritualistic walls of sound. I remember seeing them together live for the first time, Ann on the floor in front of her various gear, Brian standing next to her with his guitar, the two of them blending and blurring their voices together through an impossible amount of effects processing, unleashing an unending wave of blissed-out roar with an utterly flattening climax. I'm pretty sure I was lying on the floor towards the end of it, eyes closed, just soaking up the vastness of their music. It was incredible. And every time I've seen them perform since then, it's somehow more energetic, more ecstatic, more joyous than before, the pair reveling in their sounds, Brian crafting enormous riff-grooves that circle endlessly over Ann's exhilarating electro-invocations and her sweeping, seraphic singing that’s stretched out into wordless cloudscapes of chorus-drenched sound. That Earth vibe I mentioned? It's still there, Brian's cyclical riffing still evoking that offbeat drone-rock bliss we got from Phase 3 and (especially) Pentastar: In the Style of Demons. But whereas initially that hypno-riffing and layered shredding and winding sky-high leads was the centerpiece of Darsombra's music, now it was subsumed into the larger whole, with the result producing something akin to being caught up in the currents of a cosmic storm, pulled along by this sometimes creepy, more often glorious, always perfect pandemonium of krautrock-esque pulse, lush synthesizer and electronic effects, soaring seemingly wordless choral vocals, and biting, metallic psych-guitar. Bewitching, for sure. And that's not even remarking on the band's visual assault, with a constant stream of kaleidoscopic craziness projected onto the screen behind the band, their bizarre, hallucinatory and often hilarious video-collages perfectly synched with the rising, swelling waves of sound. Darsombra sound huge and crushing and beautiful on disc, but their live experience is something not to be missed.
And on their 2023 album Dumesday Book reaches new heights of euphoric, heart-rending power and triumph. It's easily the band's best work to date. It builds on that unusual mix of Teutonic throb, drone-metal crunch, quirky humor and electronic sense overload, but these ten tacks ripple with an even higher frequency. It's one of my fave albums of 2023, no question. From the meandering guitar and bright, searing synth melody that opens the album with "Shelter In Place", Dumesday blasts off into outer / inner space, led by emotive leads and oceanic buzz and crashing gongs before they lock into the eternal with "Call The Doctor (Pandemonium Mix)". The song is incredibly, absurdly catchy, with lovely vocoder vocals transmitting from above chugging hard-rock guitar chords and blooping, bleeping synth melody. Like some gigantic 70's arena rock hook soaked with Tangerine Dream / Klaus Schulze-esque keys and gorgeous processed singing. The music weaves in and around these moments of majestic catchy space-rock nirvana, sometimes dipping into a kind of primal percussive groove, splashes of solarized atonal synth-bloop, long stretches of droning metallic power chord rumble, malfunctioning electronics, weird city noises and barking dogs and random clatter popping in and out. There are long shadows that sometimes creep across the face of this music, occasionally unleashing some harsh dissonance or sinsiter minor-key riff, like on " Everything Is Canceled". But then there's that glittery “glammy" quality to the band, both visually and sonically. It bleeds out through their wild pop hooks, the and synchronized outfits, staining everything around it. The moments of darkness are always ultimately swallowed up by the duo's elemental euphoria that they create. Even when Brian is laying down the heaviest possible stoner-metal riff ("Nightgarden (Profundo Mix)"), it's almost always surrounded by this intoxicating aura, a kind of Kirlian glow of jubilation, glinting and flashing off the beatific vocal melodies, weirdo noises, and lovely keyboard lines like shafts of light hitting that hunk of bismuth on the album cover. Then there's "Azimuth", nearly twenty minutes of haunting synth and bone-rattling distorted low-end rumble, blown-out electronics and mellifluous guitar wandering around, the duo bringing a defined percussive beat this time, slow and mesmeric, a tick-tock pulse anchoring the music as it ascends to celestial heights - the song slowly unfolds into this moody swirl of guitar and synth melodies woven together, building into a kind of orchestral hypno-rock, heavy and trippy and utterly trance-inducing. A massive metallic psych-glam ceremony stretching skyward forever. Flowing right into the looping mesmer of "A New Dell", itself stretching out to the horizon and out into space. Into the windswept barren of "Gibbet Lore", with its killer metallic leads and Morricone-esque twang. The culmination of everything as " Mellow Knees" closes the trip with its final blast of crushing synth and gently plucked melody and whooshing keys.
t is an amazing, transformative piece of music that absolutely must be heard to in its entirety. Each song is just a piece of the monument, staggering in its splendor. Again, Darsombra and Dumesday Book exist outside of "genre". I recommened this album to anyone into anything from Ya Ho Wha 13 and Hawkwind to the aforementioned Pentastar-era Earth, from Ash Ra Tempel to Animal Collective and Lysol-era Melvins (especially their "Hung Bunny"), Deerhunter to Roxy Music to Sunn O))), Growing to 70's Bowie to the weirdest moments of Boris and Emerson Lake And Palmer. And beyond. So far beyond...
I love this band.
Crucial Blast is ECSTATIC to partner with Darsombra and Pictogen for a special double-cassette boxset of "Dumesday Book". The entire album is spread across four sides of glorious analog audio cassette, their spaced-out heaviness and joyous drone rock fusing perfectly with magnetic tape. The "Dumesday Book" 2xCASSETTE BOX presents the two cassettes in a black clamshell case with revised full-color outer sleeve, each tape housed in an individual full-color slipsleeve / o-card that combine together to make a single image, accompanied by a modified reproduction of the booklet from the LP/CD editions, with various extras including a pair of Darsombra 1" badges, Darsombra sticker, and more. Released in a limited edition of 150 copies through Crucial Blast.
REVIEWS OF DARSOMBRA'S DUMESDAY BOOK:
"Darsombra's 'Dumesday Book' swings from despondency to exhilaration, exhaustion to hope, surveying landscapes internal, external and cosmic. Theirs has always been an expansive music; here it covers more ground than ever and with considerable confidence."
-The Wire
"The vast, open spaces that Darsombra's music explores and evokes lie somewhere beyond the sky. The music rises higher and higher, becoming almost transcendental, all the while reflecting a very down-to-earth story."
-POP Matters
"Darsombra are known for fusing glam-prog-psych-stoner rock into hallucinating songs with fascinating video art...like entering a sonic illusion where you feel comfortably numb and don't want to leave."
-Echoes and Dust
credits
released March 5, 2024
Recorded 2020-2023 by Darsombra at Whale Manor, Baltimore, Maryland
Production and Mixing by Brian Daniloski
Graphic Design and Art by Ann Everton
Mastered by Jon Smulyan
Crucial Blast is an independent underground label and online shop specializing in cutting edge, experimental heavy music and
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