EP Review: Occult Tapes

Desbot: One who sits at his computer all night trolling political forums for politically incorrect posts and spamming those posts with left-wing idiocy. – Urban Dictionary. Desbot are a supergroup based in Napier made up of Kingfischer’s Tom Pierard on drums, Come to Dolly’s Nick Blow on keyboards and Jakob’s Maurice Beckett on bass. Occult Tapes has been in the works since 2015.

What has emerged from those occult sessions is a low, sternum resonating sound that lays the root system for a film score to a movie that will only ever exists, viscerally, in your head. Occult Tapes follows a process of painting a scene in your mind with great care and detail, and then just when you think it’s as clear and intractable as a religious vision, they move it and change it, warping the landscape you’ve built and putting it through tensions and permutations like a character in a book. There’s narrative momentum in Occult Tapes.

Opening scene In Waves begins with a beat reminiscent of Deftones. Over the course of the first third it finds its foundation and beds itself in the pit of your solar plexus before moving you like a carpet and sweeping you out from under your own heart.

Clyde was particularly warm for me because it reminds me of Scarling, which is a band I love. Those grumbling low tones fill me with a sense of well-being that doesn’t feel false or disingenuous. It’s close to what music would feel like if you built it like a cradle, and though it tenses up into moments of chaotic anxiety, it delivers you back into a bed of leaves.

Occult Tapes are expertly and lovingly produced, with great depth and breadth. It is a piece of work that benefit greatly from a headphone listen. Swirling pans and dynamic dips and climaxes make Occult Tapes perfect for a closed-eyes deep listen, but also have the physiological affectation to make your daily routine feel like you’re washing dishes on the set of Dune.