The primitive sounding blues being played on White Man at the Door is similar to Tom Waits or Nick Cave’s early excursions with The Bad Seeds. The Lost Domain never match those artists for power and originality but like those artists they do give modern blues playing a swift kick. It is the dark mythological blues that only came into existence when white people came onto the scene (something that is alluded to in the title of the album), something that has been done to death but can still provide the odd surprise. By no means is this a masterpiece but this album at least had some life as the band puts their own spin on the blues.
The six recordings included here were started four years ago and never finished. On some of the pieces it is impossible to tell that they are incomplete, elsewhere the shortcomings are obvious. However, the sound of the record is always flawless. All the pieces sound like they were recorded live in a large empty room, the reverb spilling with atmosphere. It’s possible to differentiate the physical distance between the players and the microphone; it is a very natural sounding record. Granted it is rough sounding but the roughness of the recording fits the songs like a dirty glove.
As nice as the recordings sound this doesn’t hide the fact that these are unfinished songs. “Boll Weevil” meanders and dithers for its duration, going nowhere. It sounds like a demo where the band might take one or two details from to make a new song rather than a stand alone piece. The same can be said of a couple of other pieces, they’re the kind of thing that would be of interest if the songs had been completed to see how they had evolved. Instead of evolution, much of the music here sounds extinct. On the other side of things, there are a couple of pieces that sound great as they are. “In My Time of Dying” is a long and repetitive piece with lots of fire and conviction in The Lost Domain’s playing to keep me listening. The simple beat and hollering strip the music and the emotion down to its bare essentials, it is a cathartic fifteen minutes.
White Man at the Door is an average album with moments of brilliance. Alas these moments don’t come often enough as the incomplete nature of the recordings show the songs as bare skeletons without enough flesh or vitality to constitute a song of their own. I’d be interested to hear some finished material by The Lost Domain to compare to this disc but as it stands it’s not something I’ll come back to too often.
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