Dommengang - Everybody's Boogie (2015)

Dommengang’s music is expansive and driving. The band’s songs are propelled by a killer rhythm section and fronted by Sig Wilson, a mainstay of the Pacific Northwest psych scene. He is joined by Brian Markham and Adam Bulgasem, themselves life-long musicians and connected to the DIY scenes on the West and East coasts. While the trio’s affection for electric blues and proto-punk bombast is clear, their music abandons traditional song structures and replaces their recognizable tropes with progressive frameworks. The band’s debut, Everybody’s Boogie pivots between gloriously inventive riffs and fuzzed-out experimentation, a combination so potent that the listener hardly notices that they rarely sing. Wilson has often taken the role of collaborator in bands such as Holy Sons, Castanets, and Scout Niblett, and his experience and skill are on full display on his first record as a leader.

Dommengang was formed in Brooklyn in the spring of 2014. Despite the urban environment that birthed the band, each member has rural roots, stretching from Alaska to Virginia to Oregon. Like kindred spirits Pontiak, that separation from big cities allowed them to develop musically outside of pre-ordained, and many times clichéd, styles that define traditional scenes centered around big cities. The few lyrics on the album reflect a feeling of displacement and the paradoxical loneliness that comes from living in the crowded environment of New York City.

Everybody’s Boogie was recorded and mixed in Greenpoint, Brooklyn over the course of four days in July of 2014. It was recorded live in the studio with minimal overdubs. Dommengang will tour the west coast with Holy Sons this summer, pulling double duty as the opener and as Emil Amos’ backing band, and will also play select east coast cities this spring.