Darsombra – Dumesday Book 2xCassette

Darsombra – Dumesday Book 2xCassette

Darsombra’s “Dumesday Book” is a whopping seventy-five minutes of sonic revelry, to 
delight and confound both seasoned Darsombra listeners and unwitting new ears alike. 
Originally conceived as a surreal take on a pop album to contrast with their ominously 
prescient monolithic 2019 release, “Transmission”, 2023’s “Dumesday Book” is a ten
song survey of sentiment and human experience in the pandemic, from initial lockdown 
to vaccinated re-emergence and beyond—which, in the Darsombra microcosm, means 
from cancelled tours to returning to the road. Fittingly, the band wrote the framework for the album during the quarantine of spring 2020, and then tirelessly refined it over the 
next three years.

 
At times bizarre, intense, mollifying, sardonic, irreverent, overwhelming, and hopeful, 
“Dumesday Book” takes its name from the 11th century census book that served as the 
oldest public record in the English language, Domesday Book—so named because its 
decisions were unalterable, its sentence was law, and its survey of human activity so 
complete. The album’s sound follows the theme of survey as well, with glam-prog 
frivolity giving way to heavy psych doomscapes laden with music concrète field 
recordings. A bong rip takes you from a disconcerting chord progression to a goblin 
doggerel dirge, all to resolve into a space-shimmery synthcapade laced with heart
fuelled guitar riffs worthy of any Krautrockian nod for a non-Teutonic band. Of course, 
there are serious moments of ROCK woven throughout this hour-and-change-long 
musical journey, but to typify “Dumesday Book” as simply drone, or metal, or psych—or 
even prog—is missing the point.