Gloom – Cabbage Patch Kill Dolls (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

There is something about the repetitiveness of the lyrics and the restlessness of the music that sets up an inherent tension at the heart of this latest single from the excellently named Cabbage Patch Kill Dolls: the melodic lines that clash with raw and roaring guitars that brood in the distance like the sound of approaching thunder, and a fantastic frisson set up by the sound of the near-spoken-word delivery moving against walls and weaves of sound.

Throughout ‘Gloom’s mere two and a bit minutes, it casts all manner of sounds across the creative canvas; Bachian melodies lurk at the back of the song, on which post-punk, post-rock, post-everything guitars pirouette and prowl; choruses are formed merely by lyrical guile rather than by chord or key changes and while the song is too melodic to be called avant-garde, it is certainly a strange beast.

So, when I say strange, I mean it in the most complimentary way. Strange is, at least in my understanding, a positive word. Strange implies adventurous; it advocates something non-conformist and perhaps challenging, something playing by its own rules, eschewing convention and conformity; strange is its own entity, singular and searching, unaware of or certainly unwilling to court fad or fashion, a sound unbuffeted by the winds of sonic zeitgeist.

And all those ideas and attitudes are certainly encapsulated in this here.