Phonebook Eater 6/10

It Sounds Like It's From Another Age, But It Can Be Better.

Dordeduh are a Romaniam Atmospheric Black Metal band, and this debut album of theirs, “Dar De Duh”, was released in 2012. The band is a side project of the more popular Romanian BM band Negura Bunget, and the two acts share in common a musicians like Hupogrammos and Sol Faur, as well as a fairly similar musical style. Like Negura Bunget, Dordeduh are one of those Black Metal bands with a great fascination for nature, Paganism, and the occult: musically, they are influenced by Romanian Folk music, but they also like to insert a lot of primitive, tribal-sounding percussion.

The production on this album is probably its best general quality: it doesn’t sound like it was recorded in 2012, it sounds like it was recorded in a forgotten cave, 3000 years ago, hypothesizing they had the equipment and technology to record the music. The production gives an impressively authentic sensation that you’re hearing music coming from an ancient era, and the Metal side of it also feels like it comes from another time. The incredible wonders of the album however stop here: The songwriting is not nearly as memorable as it was back in 2006, when Negura Bunget released an album called “Om”, honestly one of the best Metal albums of the last twenty years. But on “Dar De Duh”, the structuring of the songs and of the album of the whole is still quite impressive, and the band proves they can skillfully translate from one musical passage to another, smoothly and logically: the album itself has a good and consistent flow, and does have a roundness to it.

But the songs themselves are missing; they feel way too distant and not that engaging, and often repetitive instrumentally speaking. A lot of them furthermore are quite lengthy, the longest one (the intro) being sixteen minutes long. This is an album where moments are superior to songs, and this is said even though the songs are well planned: it’s just that some passages fail to impact as much as other ones. The album as a whole is not at all a bad experience, because of the saving graces like the production and those moments here and there that are quite the special treat. It’s no harm hoping however that this project next time comes up with an album full of great songs, an achievement Dordeduh can certainly be capable of.