Songs about burning witches tend to be a bit of a downer, don’t they? Well, no actually, and certainly not in the hands of chipper indie-types Dallas Don’t whose debut EP, `Retrace This Place’, spans the post-Libertines landscape of guitar-oriented music, with a healthy dose of angst and angular noise thrown in for good measure. While the band hinted at something along the lines of a singalong on their previous demo (`Fife For Life’), opening track ‘The Witches Stone’ is a brighter representation of Dallas Don’t’s catchy songwriting abilities, infusing a familiar chord progression with bouncy, wonky charm and singer/guitarist duo Niall and Jenny’s boy-girl vocal dynamic.
But things get really interesting when the band allow the feedback to rage on the Mclusky-esque ‘Solution’, Nial sounding like the vitriolic Andy Falkous had he been born about a hundred miles north. Plumming further back, the final two tracks sound like they could have been plucked from Idlewild’s `Captain’: wonderfully scrappy guitars, frenetic drumming, and an undercurrent of emotional urgency (‘Screaming At The Sea’) and tension (‘New Wolf’).
Sometimes you expect a band to go one way and they go another; Dallas Don’t’s previous demos suggested that they would go down the weirder Cellar Family route but they’ve actually reached a pleasant plateau where they exist on their own terms, balancing light and dark with a prototypically indie framework and the occasional urge to make an abrasive racket. `Retrace This Place’ will either hit you immediately or require a few listens, but sooner or later Dallas Don’t will put a spell on you.
[Originally published in Nightshift magazine, Issue 212, March 2013]
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