CD REVIEW: DATURA4 – Demon Blues

Shane | 17 September 2015 | Reply

CD REVIEW: DATURA4 – Demon Blues
Alive Records
August 2015
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
9 ½ /10

Dom Mariani channels the head shaking, heavy boogie of the Aussie rockers he grew up on with his latest outfit – and that means monolithic riffs and peals of distorted guitars, à la Buffalo, Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs & Lobby Lloyd’s Coloured Balls.

Teaming up with old compadre Greg Hitchcock (The Go Starts, The Neptunes) has made for a rather large wall of guitar noise, expertly backed up by the rhythm section of Warren Hall (The Drones) and Stu Loasby who are so firmly in the pocket from the word go that you’d assumed these cats had been playing together since birth.

Whilst at first listen it may seem like Demon Blues is a rifferamic hard rockin’ boogie assault from start to finish, there’s nothing one-dimensional about the album at all – like an back-road rally there are wild careers off the beaten track into Hawkwind-ey space-psych (Another Planet), instrumental drag-race-guitar-duels (Hoonsville) and sludgey proto-metal-meets-T-Rex stomps (the title track), just to name a few.

The guitar is king in Datura4’s world, and fellow worshippers of the six-stringed god will find that in reaching back to their deep, formative, cult-rock past, they have fashioned something fresh and resolutely now – not to mention essential.