Music Review: Doomsquad, Kalaboogie

By Jeffery X Martin

It takes a certain amount of balls to name your band Doomsquad. It sets up myriad expectations. What kind of music do you expect when you hear that name? Totalitarian anthems, denouncing self and praising the Motherland? Some heavy-handed comic book villainy? Angry Norsemen with long hair and corpse paint?

Wrong. Try again.

Canadian trio Doomsquad makes music for technomancy, summoning the Elder Gods through instant messaging, touch-screen rituals conducted on machines made of bamboo, sage, and feedback. They are live-streaming the Eschaton inside a sacred circle lined with sequencers and ash. This is New Age music for those who refuse to be calm, for those who have shattered their quartz crystals and are demanding some action from those entities within and without.

Kalaboogie starts with the double whammy of “When the Dead Become Infants” and “Head Spirit (for our Mechanical Time).” Immediately, the listener is in territory both familiar and alien, like going to your creepy great-aunt’s rundown house and venturing down the dark wooden paneled hallway to the bathroom for the first time. Wooden percussion and soft keyboards are soon undermined by a sound reminiscent of a nuclear attack warning. The music becomes a menace, until the percussion begins wrapping itself around the klaxon. The end of the world becomes something to dance to, a time of revelry.

That seems to be the theme of the entire album. Doomsquad uses technology to decry technology. It calls the listener back to an older, simpler time. Smatterings of the occult pop up here and there, bringing back fragmented memories from the collective subconscious. “Born from the Marriage of the Moon and a Crocodile” seems to reference the Mayan calendar, but there’s no way to be sure. It rings a bell, though, way back in the brain, on a primal level.

Maybe you need a less arcane description.

Doomsquad is the adopted love child of Laurie Anderson and Kate Bush. They raised the band in a field of poppies and shrunken heads while listening to nothing for ten years but Dead Can Dance. Instead of pacifiers, they were given didgeridoos. They were handed keyboards instead of schoolbooks, guitars instead of guns. The gods revealed themselves to Doomsquad, and they also invented their own. Now they’re making records.

There’s a lot to like on Kalaboogie. It bursts through the standard new age and electronic music boundaries while still creating the same sort of energy. Doomsquad tries to create a naturist religious experience, and for the most part, succeeds. However, as with most religious experiences, there’s a lot of repetition. Some listeners may find the album too droning for their tastes. Kalaboogie can get heavy, and there may not be enough musical variety for some.

For those brave and patient enough to immerse themselves in it, Kalaboogie serves as an abstract history lesson, a spastic time machine caught between the past and the future, with music both reverent and danceable. It’s not an easy journey, but it’s worthwhile.

Kalaboogie was released February 25 through Hand Drawn Dracula/No Pain In Pop.

Tour Dates:
March 11 – 16 Austin, TX – SXSW
03/15 Hot Springs, AR – Valley Of The Vapors Festival
03/20 Albuquerque, NM – Sister Bar
03/21 Marfa, TX – El Cosmico
03/24 San Diego, CA – Soda Bar
03/26 Los Angeles, CA – Origami Vinyl (In-Store)
03/27 Los Angeles, CA – Los Globos
03/29 Denver, CO – Rhinoceropolis
04/14 Chicago, IL – The Empty Bottle
05/08 Brighton UK : The Great Escape Festival