Doom Shrugs Deliver What’s Likely The Weirdest Good Music You’ve Heard In Awhile

Doom Shrugs present what’s likely some of the weirdest music you’ve heard in awhile, if not the definitively most bizarre. Importantly, though- it works, which shouldn’t be taken for granted. The project’s 2018 release The Clairolfactant and the Flatulent Ghost spins on its head with harsh technical and engaging playing filtered through a jazzed up perspective. Although there are odd time signatures already widely present in plenty of heavy music, here, it’s turned up a major notch with the band truly going off the edge into what almost sounds like metal free jazz.

The music does pack that metallic edge, but it isn’t always overly compact, moving nimbly between notes and concepts and really never staying in one place for very long. There’s at least as much of an apparent understanding of the usefulness of near silence as there is of knocking the listener off their feet – metaphorically or literally. No path feels unexplored here.

Through the twists, the band returns to a core of extremity and bizarre turns. The work feels so much like it works in part because there’s no feeling of hesitation. The band embraces the weirdness, marching full force ahead, it sounds, and letting the listener in on the full experience of the twisted musical fantasy they’ve somehow become party to.

Sometimes when an artist approaches something odd, they filter it through their own perspective, aims, and the like. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it’s lacking and the artist keeps building.

Here, with Doom Shrugs, there is no apparent filter. The experience is oddly liberating and exhilarating for the listener as they’re taken along for a ride that’s going who knows where. The music sounds like a cross between mathcore and jazz and ambient and experimental and.. you get the idea. Some of the most familiar genre terms don’t do much here. Doom Shrugs material feels perfect for the listener looking for a truly new experience with their heavy music. There’s nothing boring in this bizarre wonderland.

5/5 Stars

Check out the band on Facebook, and listen below on Spotify.