I’ve opined this many times before in prior online ramblings, but damn me if Sweden doesn’t produce more bands per head of population than pretty much any other nation in the world, and that’s just in the realms of hard rock and metal that I travel, let alone more mainstream stuff that I’m sure fills commercial radio stations and instantly downloaded and equally instantly discarded ephemera. I don’t know if it’s something in the water, or maybe something as bizarre as music being an integral part of the nation’s economic model (wouldn’t that be nice?), but they just keep on coming, and whilst I appreciate Domkraft aren’t a new act, ‘Seeds’ being their third release, they are new to me.
Opening the album in a suitably epic fashion is the nine-minute plus title track ‘Seeds’, a laconic, meandering melange of tripped out riffs and down tuned hooks, threaded throughout and bound together with the sweet smoky tendrils of the good stuff, occasionally insistent drum beats shaking the listener out of their trance and getting necks nodding along. ‘Perpetuator’ follows with a wall of fuzz that flows from the speakers with all the speed, and all the power, of an advancing glacier, occasional delicacy being shown in gentler psychedelic parts that just contrast the inexorable progress of this juggernaut of a track. Space rock imaginings dominate the more than aptly titled ‘Into Orbit’, a track that is the aural embodiment of patchouli-soaked denim and demands to be played to a backdrop of a swirling light show, whilst follow up ‘Dawn of Man’ is built around a single primal beat that encapsulates the primitive origins of the song title.
‘Tremors’ comes next, and while it is sadly not a homage to the modern classic monster movie of the same name, something I’m sure that Domkraft could undoubtedly do justice to, there is a bit of a desert scene twang to the guitar that invokes an image of dusty vistas stretching into the distance, matched by vocals that start out so laid back they are practically horizontal before developing into an impassioned plea. After the short and stark instrumental break of ‘Krank Blekhet’, Domkraft return to the epic with the sonic pummelling of ‘Audiodome’, wave after wave of looping, hypnotic riffs thundering forth, intermixed with distorted guitar effects and meandering stoner solos carried aloft by the bass and drums that merge into a single organism in a lysergic symbiosis with the guitar, the vocals almost being another instrument in themselves, merging with the music into a single gestalt. Halfway through its barely sub ten-minute length the track slows to a doom-laden crawl, fading out in pace until it disappears in a single tone of feedback, rather than the old recording track of simply fading down the volume at the recording desk to close out what would otherwise be an open ended song.
Domkraft have a very definite target demographic, a demographic that would not be adverse to long hair and wide flares, and are very unlikely to trouble the popular charts here in the UK. However, if you want your Iommi worship tinged with the inner space explorations of Dave Brock, well, Domkraft will provide that for you, and provide it for you by the smoking resinous shovel full.
(8/10 Spenny)
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