by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
Dama Scout, the London via Glasgow experimental rock band, describes themselves as an itch that scratches itself. Their new album gen wo lai (come with me) is not that exactly, but what the band is getting at in their Bandcamp bio speaks to what their music attempts also: a condition of thesis and antithesis perpetually becoming without resolving. It’s a classic example of transcendence versus immanence. Where transcendence is always looking outwards for meaning – think western religions – immanence sees meaning as something within. The songs on Dama Scout’s debut full length are immanent, having all the possibility, excitement, and beauty already contained within them. The fun of listening to gen wo lai (come with me) is experiencing the ways in which the songs become themselves.
Consider: when the noise section of “lonely udon” interrupts the 808 cowboy shuffle and Eva Liu’s lilting vocals, the song turns into something wholly other. Or when the title track’s massive groove harnesses the muted-piano future-dance of Dawn of Midi, the cinematic guitar of Autolux, and the loops and noise of Warp bands. Or when the brisk trot of “emails from suzanne” dislocates into a shuddering, chaotic mess. It feels like we’re listening to a blossoming of algae blooms shedding incandescent sparkles atop moonlit waves. It’s the stuff of sci-fi and magical realism at once.
I suppose Dama Scout is essentially shoegaze music, or at least it has roots in the genre, but Dama Scout’s world is stranger. The twelve songs performed by Liu and her childhood friends, Luciano Rossi on bass and keys and Danny Grant on drums, are a portal into a world reminiscent of our own, but one where the colors are more vibrant, the darkness darker, and the profane wondrous. Throughout the album, songs evolve and contort. Listening can be disorienting but it never feels like Dama Scout are veering off the rails. Much like their literary-indebted name (Harper Lee anyone?), the band are cognizant of a narrative. We as listeners may be along for a ride, but it’s one the band has carefully curated.
Album highlights are many and disparate, often occurring within the same song. Because Dama Scout aren’t interested in traditional pop song structure, in which we return to the same two hooks over and over in the span of three minutes, the songs are free to transmogrify indiscriminately. There’s a collapsing of time and space here; “pineapple eyes” transforms from house-of-mirrors folk stomp to math-y waltz as if it were passing through the event horizon of a black hole. The guitars on “dan dan bub” volley between pleasant and atonal until halfway through the song where the entire mix disappears into a shimmer of gossamer. When the mix reappears, a menace awakens with it, replete with a bouncing saxophone solo and distortion swells.
The chaos lingering beneath the surface does not imply that Dama Scout’s songs are too strange to be beautiful. Just the opposite. “pink lips on a blue face” may surround Liu’s vocals with pitch warbles and washed-out reverb, but her dreamy, soft-focus melodies can’t help but bathe the song in a warm opiate glow. Elsewhere, “yuè liàng” finds Liu singing a tune reminiscent of a traditional Cantonese lullaby. It’s affecting and mesmeric. These quieter moments proliferate the final restful third of the album. Despite the rumble that ends “bubble bee,” gen wo lai ultimately feels like a reassurance. The alienation, the fragmentation; they are but forms the other takes. We need not be afraid. The immanence of Dama Scout allows us to recognize the stranger is inside us all.