DRORE are a band. A new band. A new band from Oxford, UK. They’ve got a tape out. Yeah, it’s an actual tape. Deal with it. Well, I should say it WAS out. Then it sold out. It sold out because it’s some bloody nasty, aggressive and filthy slime and people like us tend to like having that miserable shit in their lives. You can still get it on download though. And you should. Drore have got Taz and Olly from Undersmile on board, as well as some geezers from Crippled Black Phoenix and Girl Power, and we know those dudes all cut the musical mustard. So are Drore much like Undersmile then? Not on your waffle.
Drore sound angry. Serene, dynamic and well versed sure, but mostly, they’re bloody angry. After the sound of a toilet flushing welcomes you in, the feedback slamming off the guitar amps instantly gets inside you, gripping hold of your spine before you can make it back through the front door. The warped, unnerving hardcore-meets-noiserock bombast of ‘Skinjob’ sets all the right tones for this compact, yet muscular four-tracker with a din that’s akin to stuffing the varying nauseas of Monarch!, Oathbreaker, L7, Torpor and Sonic Youth into a barrel together, corking it and then rolling it down a gorge. These themes and influences continue, but twist and rattle in constantly changing directions as the EP ploughs onwards. Whether it’s the cackling noisenik refrain of ‘Fukbags’ or the psychotic dribblings of fuzzed-up punk number ‘Hippy Crack’, Drore remain driven, all powerful and demented throughout.
Taz is a phenomenally stark vocalist, cruising between backhanded murmurings and the screams of a belching sea-banshee in an instant, no more so on that cacophony of a closer ‘Fukbags’. It takes precision and skill to hit the notes she manages, but it’s a set of techniques that at times adds an eerie, backwater calm to the string-driven chaos that pushes on ahead of her and her esteemed bandmates. The best example of this comes with the sludgy, sluggish psychedelia of ‘Greys’ which then opens out onto a field of dangerously blackened fury. With Taz yo-yoing between sultry, eye-rolling wails and truly unhinged bellows against a wall of taut hardcore riffs, you’re genuinely unsure as to how or even whether you’ll come back from the brink of this mind-suppressing trauma at all.
So what’s the summary? Should I buy this thing? Well, for a start, ‘TAPEONE’s bizarre mishmash of ferocious grunge and alternative fuzzpunked doom is available digitally for just £2. In our gloriously fragmented post-Brexit world that’s like what? €2.30 right? Something like that. So, to answer my question with a question, what’s the worst that can happen? And to answer that question with an answer: the worst that could happen is that you’ll be sucked into Drore’s world of a thousand broken mirrors, stabbed by their pain-invoking riffs, beaten solid by twenty minutes of demented, haywire percussion and drugged by Taz’s intoxicatingly hypnotic vocal peril until you’re no longer sure which side of sanity your consciousness truly lies.
You into that? Yeah, I thought so.
ARTIST: Drore
TITLE: “Tapeone”
RELEASE DATE: 19th August, 2016
LABEL: Rad Nauseam Records / Lonely Linda Records
GENRE: Grungy noisy heavy doom
MORE: Facebook / Bandcamp
Last modified: 26 September 2016
