Back in the day, we used to call this a double A-side, one record with two tracks, both of equal importance, with equal billing, two sides of the same sonic coin. That said, I don’t remember buying too many singles in my formative years that sounded like this first sonic one-two sucker punch from Doom Lounge – unless of course Bauhaus snuck out a flamenco-infused, spaghetti western, post-punk, dance remix that passed me by.
Of course, not being able to pin a song down is precisely what makes it so intriguing. If it sounded like something you have heard before, if it was easy to describe or logically explained away, why would you need it in your life?
And you do need this in your life. Why? Because music is becoming stale, a place of faddish facades and comfortable complacency, fleeting fashion and a rehashing of the same old sonic templates. But nothing could be further from the truth here. “Cairns,” the first of these two exotic instrumentals, is serpentine and seductive, a blend of skittering, glitchy beats and virtuoso guitars, strange textures and beguiling tones, Morricone writing film scores for shootouts in Ibiza nightclubs.
“Capela Dos Ossos” continues the sonic story, though it is even more fractured and fragmented —a death-disco dirge for the Ketamine generation, a track destined to be the sound track to a drugs experience if ever there was one. Sorry, that’s just the way it is.
I love it when I’m asked to write about such music and find that it can’t be done, at least not well. It means that the music has pushed mere words to their limit; it means that artists are finding new ways to break molds and move forward. But more than that, it means that the only real way to find out what the music is about is to play it, absorb it, be challanged and beguiled by it and react to it, which is the whole point of music in the first place.
And if that is true of music in general, with Doom Lounge it is doubly so!