Cult Of Dom Keller – Unholy Drum

I’m lucky enough to have some very good pals over at Fuzz Club, purveyors of the finest psychedelic fuzzy bliss going. A parcel from them landing on the doorstep is always cause for celebration in the Static Sounds Clubhouse. That is exactly how Unholy Drum, the new album from Cult Of Dom Keller, arrived for me. A band that are brand new to these ears but certainly not a new band by a long chalk. I couldn’t wait to get it on the turntable and by the end of that first play, I was fully in.

The Nottingham trio of Neil Marsden, Ryan DelGaudio and Alistair Burns make music that creeps, grinds and mutates. This sixth album may come with a long history behind it, but for me it felt like discovering a hidden level in a game I thought I knew. Unholy Drum arrives after five years away from making records, and you can hear that time inside the record’s bones.

The key figure in this re-emergence is Angus Andrew of LIARS, who joins the band on production duties. His presence feels significant from the first listen, because Unholy Drum takes the Cult Of Dom Keller sound and bends it toward something more fractured, more art damaged and more willing to let odd shapes sit at the centre of the music. The band describe the process with him like this:

That tells you plenty about the album before a note has even played. This is an epic listen. Let’s drop the needle and dive in.

‘Live Without Life’ opens the record with a title that already sounds half cursed. The track does a smart job of easing you back into the Cult without giving everything away too quickly. The opening bars sound like Dracula playing his organ but then the pulse begins and the song just stops. Then. It just opens up and soars. There’s a real Beta Band vibe to this one which I love. The chorus though, just wow! This is how you open an album folks.

‘Let Me Go, Satan’ brings the ritual element closer to the surface. The title has a lovely sense of melodrama, but the song itself feels grimy and physical rather than theatrical. The guitars move with a scorched thickness, the synths bleed into the gaps and the vocal delivery feels caught somewhere between confession and command. There is a real bodily weight to the track. You can feel the bass in your chest just dragging the whole thing forward, while the surrounding noise keeps folding in on itself. This track has a groove to kill for.

Up next ‘Disappear’ is a dynamic track that comes and goes, but mostly blows your mind. It has it all, psychedelic spaced out sections where the vocals seem like they’re being sung from a black hole. Then you have these eruptions where your speakers scream for mercy. Guitars and bass turning the fuzz up to eleven with an orchestral sweep behind it all. This is powerful stuff.

‘B(o)ing’ is such a strange song title, and thankfully the music lives up to that other worldliness. My immediate thought on hearing this was, this would make a killer Bond theme. It’s bold, and brash when it needs to be but has that cinematic flair at the same time. The orchestral flourishes on this one only add to that widescreen sound.

‘Leaders With Hooves’ turns the album’s political sickness into something blunt and physical. The band describe it as being about “the confession of the cruelty woven into power itself,” and that idea drives straight through the track. The drums feel like a march across broken ground, the guitars detonate and grind with a thick low menace and the vocals sound buried inside the machinery of authority. There is a crushing inevitability to the way the song moves. It does not need to explain its target at length, because the sound already tells you what kind of power is being examined. The hooves are right there in the rhythm. They hit hard, they keep coming, and they leave very little standing behind them.

An oddly pitched vocal is our entry point to ‘Void Horizon’ next. It soon opens into stoned wobble that Beck would kill for. It’s the drums that really grab my attention here in this opening stretch. Pounding when required and sitting out to add impact. There’s an almost Beach Boys like harmony sting in the middle that then leads us n to the second half. A choral backdrop now in place the song really fills out. Glitchy, jittery synth wails joining the fray. This is my kinda jam.

After that dynamic wobblefest, ‘Shoot My Mind’ feels sharper and more agitated. The track moves with nervous energy, and the guitars have a bite that suits the title. The band sound tightly wound, as though every part of the song is being held in place by the sheer force of their combined anxiety. The vocals cut through with a fevered quality, while the synths add heat behind the guitars. I like how lean it feels. It gives the album a needed jolt at this point, pulling you out of the spacious shadow of ‘Void Horizon’ and placing you back inside something immediate, wired and restless.

‘They Cut The Heart From Out Of The Sky’ might be the finest title on the record, and the song carries that sense of damaged grandeur beautifully. It has a bruised, weight, with the band leaning into that filmic scale while keeping the texture rough and human. The guitars feel scraped and weathered, the drums hold the song with a slow force, and the vocals bring a strange sadness to the middle of it all. You can feel the album’s apocalyptic streak here. It sounds like aftermath. It sounds like people standing under a blackened sky, trying to work out what has been taken from them. The band give us enough context to fill out that image to feel huge, yet they keep it grounded in sound. No mean feat.

‘Galaxies SOS’ closes the album with the feeling of a final message being sent through damaged equipment. It gives the record a fitting exit point, with guitars, synths and vocals all pushing toward the edge of the signal. It feels cosmic in the grubbiest possible way. No clean stars, no shining escape route, just a battered transmission trying to make it across the distance. As a final track, it works because it gathers the album’s main instincts into one last intergalactic flare of sound. It leaves you with ringing ears and a sense that you’re probably going to need to repair your speakers.

By the time the last battered signal of ‘Galaxies SOS’ fades, my first meeting with Cult Of Dom Keller has turned into a proper obsession. Unholy Drum is exactly the kind of record that rewards being heard on vinyl, with the needle tracing every warped synth turn, every scorched guitar line, every bass thud that makes the room feel smaller and stranger. For a band arriving fresh to my ears, this was one hell of an introduction. It has the weight of a group with a long past behind them, yet it also has the thrill of a band willing to pull their own sound into odd new shapes just to see what crawls out. From the organ lit weirdness of ‘Live Without Life’ to the speaker wrecking final stretch of ‘Galaxies SOS’, this album feels restless, fevered, weird in all the right crooked places, and packed with moments that make you stop what you are doing and stare at the turntable. Fuzz Club knew exactly what they were doing sending this one to the Static Sounds Clubhouse. One spin was enough to get me hooked, and now I can hear that Unholy Drum beating away long after the record has stopped.

Unholy Drum is out now via Fuzz Club. You can check it out over on the Cult Of Dom Keller Bandcamp page.

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