After a few weeks legging it around Queensland, it's time to mix things up a bit and return to the deep creative well that is old Melbourne town, where this week we come across one of our most enigmatic artists to date.
Strap in, friends, because you're in for a bit of a ride.
Dominique — Melbourne, Victoria
There is, like, almost no neatly packaged details online about the wonderfully askew excellence that is Dominique.
It would appear that this project arose out of whatever happened to New Gods, the post-Little Red project of guitarist-vocalists Dom Byrne and Adrian Beltrame, as the former looked to start performing more solo shows. So, where 2014 album So Baaad was originally recorded in 2014 as a New Gods release, it now exists on Dominique's Bandcamp, freshly re-unveiled in January this year.
Byrne still uses the New Gods Facebook Wall to share Dominique material, as there doesn't seem to be a dedicated page, while there is almost no readily available information on Google about the artist. But what is immediately apparent is that Byrne, with or without Beltrame, is a remarkably prolific musician, following May 2016's testing-of-the-waters with Share This Song with two albums released within 10 days of each other mid-late last month: UNDO and Ballet. Both full-lengths are less guitar-centric than So Baaad, which, while still steeped in electronic hallmarks and ideas, is comparatively anchored by a more organic throughline than Dominique's newer releases.
That's not a reflection on the quality of either release, mind you, but the fact merely serves to demonstrate the broad cross-section of sounds that now form Dominique's ostensible oeuvre — equal parts soul, electronic, experimental, ambient, and indescribable, the songs are both inviting and warm yet discordant and unsettling, the unifying theme seeming more than anything to be their haunting, incongruous nature.
Dominique's body of work is frequently reminiscent of the sort of barely accessible but eminently captivating compositions of acts such as Xiu Xiu (circa The Air Force), and with three wildly different, equally layered and listenable full-length albums already under their belt, now's as good a time as any to broaden your horizons a little bit and catch up with an old friend in their transcendant new guise.
Releases
So Baaad — LP (recorded 2014, released Jan 2017)
Share This Song — Single (May 2016)
Got an independent band? Got a Bandcamp page (y'know, because the title really doesn't work without it)?
Let us know if you want us to listen to your tunes, and you might get featured in a future edition of This One Time, On Bandcamp!
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