Probably more even than most bands, your first listen to Parisian trio Domadora is going to determine your overall impression of the band. Yeah, you’re probably thinking that happens all the time anyway, but I mean it. The three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Belwil, drummer Fred and bassist Guiom seem to basically have to modes of operating. Check it out:

“On the Highway” indeed. It’s some pretty straightforward stoner rock, vaguely reminiscent of early The Atomic Bitchwax, but melodically aware and not at all offensive in its approach. More or less, if I told you there’s a heavy rock band from Paris who dig their Fu Manchu and the Bitchwax and have songs about fast cars, and I played you “Lost on the Highway,” you wouldn’t tell me I was wrong about Domadora.

Now get a load of this:

I first encountered both these tracks on YouTube, and initially, I didn’t believe they were actually the same band. Not that a band can’t engage in both regular-type verse/chorus songwriting and then psych jam their way into the deep reaches of space rock, just that most bands don’t. Domadora, to the best of my knowledge, don’t have an album out (their website is more fun to navigate than it is informative), so how they might blend these sides of their sound on a full-length remains to be seen, but the prospect of their trying to bridge a sonic divide of this size is interesting enough in itself for me to want to keep them on the radar. So here we are.

Domadora has more tracks streaming on their Soundcloud, including a rough version of a Stooges cover, and are on Thee Facebooks here. All their stuff, whichever side it’s coming from, is pretty formative-sounding, but it should be fascinating to see where they wind up.

Tags: Domadora, France, Paris, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2012 at 3:36 pm and is filed under On the Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.