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Donner & The Devil
Warning Signs
New York guitarist and mad scientist Dan Walsh is involved in a staggering number of projects both in his own capacity as a songwriter, as a formidable metal vocalist, as a collaborator and gun-for-hire - but perhaps the most fascinating is his experimental, instrumental, prog / metal project under the name Donner & The Devil.
There exists no box you could stuff Donner into, no borders Walsh doesn’t trample on as soon as they’re demarcated, no begging for your approval, no sparing your feelings or your right brain.
Just unbridled, anguished, howling rage and despair and a mischievous sneer to it all that is - dare I say - devilish? It’s challenging, certainly not for everyone - and Walsh knows it - and he refreshingly doesn’t seem to give a shit.
Back in 2024, Walsh unleashed Laid to Waste, an 8 song tour-de-force that grabbed our attention and established Donner & the Devil as a true original, something that would probably appeal above all else to musicians and particularly guitarists, but that had a knack for repeatedly snatching your attention back from whatever apocalyptic daydream it had previously shoved you into against your will.
That album was full of delicious moments, among them the sauntering and sultry “Stagger” - a cinematic and symphonic epic condensed into 5 minutes of sheer bliss.
The undeniable groove a story all by itself, while Walsh weaves a web out of interlacing guitars that feel simultaneously like wisps of smoke and titanium threads.
The latest offering from Donner & the Devil is Warning Signs, a decidedly tighter collection that loses none of the scope or weight of Laid to Waste. It’s a pulverizing declaration of presence on Walsh’s part, opening with the roller coaster of a title track, a meditation and expansion of the central riff into varying degrees of madness, reflection, restraint, and recklessness. One of my favorite things about D&TD is how you regularly think he’s going to throw you something a bit catchy, a bit anthemic, like the plaintive guitar cries at 2:00 into this song, only to realize that, no, that was it, and now you’re going back into the woods with Walsh and his unrelenting assault on your expectations.
“Wayward Soul” is a welcome chance to catch our breath - and I suppose this is what passes for the soft song, though its got no less of the frantic energy found throughout the record. There’s simply less fuzz, less distortion, and less overt hostility bleeding through. The track feels pensive, melancholy, searching. The evolution over 3 minutes is a thing of beauty - you could split this song into four parts and develop an entire EP out of its shades.
“Weeping Demon” sits at the fulcrum point of this record, and it contains multitudes. This is the first time I found myself thinking - though certainly not the first time it was merited - that Walsh must have been having way too much fun recording these bass guitar parts. The bass wends its way through this entire record like an overgrown python loose in the Everglades - devouring everything in its path and growing meatier and more fearsome until it’s all you can see.
In this track, as in all D&TD records, every instrument is a universe unto itself, and each of those universes somehow sits perfectly inside the multiverse that is the song, and it all makes sense, against all odds. I confess that I don’t know how you go about recording or commissioning drums for something like this, but it feels like it was all hive-minded. The wavelength congruency required for things to gel to this degree is astonishing.
This reviewer likely doesn’t possess the requisite musical vocabulary to highlight half of what’s so brilliant on this album, and that’s fine. Suffice it to say that it’s a document best experienced as a whole, so that the listener has time to let their attention drift from one element to another, to integrate how intellectually coherent it all feels while still coming off like a swirl of absolute chaos.
Through “Wavering Will” and into the 7 minute closing track “Wild Abandon” we get the feeling of being in an uneasy fever dream, not quite a nightmare but certainly nothing you’d asked for. Perhaps you’re slogging through a swamp, some hallucinatory mix of a tar pit and a quicksand bog, always just out of reach of the branch that you can use to pull yourself up to the banks, and all throughout creatures are bursting through the muck to tear at your sleeves, laugh in your face, shove you back on your heels, beckon you onward, or shout you down.
If you enjoy prog / metal, if you’re a musician of any sort, if you’re struggling to define the bizarre mix of despair, defiance, rot, rebirth, hope, and helplessness that we’re all feeling these days, I suggest finding a time to give this record a spin. Or three. It might answer some questions for you.
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