Blooming

Description

Donna Candy’s debut album, the bass-voice-drum trio draws on experimental rock subgenres and pushes into the frontlines of heavy music. Nu metal bass riffs, pitch-shifting fuzz vocals, and splashy, fat drums layer over unsettling narratives and extreme loops to bring a little pit to the dance floor. The trio started as an improvised party band, with the idea of finding a live sound that would suit 4 am trance sets, but quickly found themselves addicted to the euphoric mud they created. Replacing their usual guitar with a bass, JS Donny drives Donna Candy with simple riffs, half clean and half shredded with Boris / Sunn O))) like distortion. They shift gears or stop abruptly, bending and stretching notes to power them up before releasing them. Nadja’s vocals tear through the top layer, heavily processed and distorted with bizarre imagery. Together, it feels like Sightings slowed down by codeine, but with Elvin Brandi on vocals. Always set up face-to-face, off-stage and surrounded by the audience, Donna Candy encourage catharsis, reciprocally transforming energy between themselves and the crowd. They create a queer euphoria that explodes metal’s narrow dichotomy between nihilistic machismo and hyperfemininity, and begins to make possible the visceral faux-hybridity of nineties nu metal. “Blooming” gives us six tracks from the band on a self-explanatory four-track split, once on board with DC’s energy, you’ll want to be part of it.