DAGOBA – Different Breed

vote
7.0

• Bands:
  DAGOBA
• Duration: 00:40:43
• Available from: 06/14/2024
• Label:

• Verycords

It is with blameless delay that we come to review the new album by the French Dagoba, a bright and luminous promise, but never kept, of a certain way of understanding modern metal beyond the Alps. In the year in which Gojira clears the 'extra metal universe performing worldwide during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics, these spurious, almost unwanted brothers, hesitate to put their snouts out of their homeland, promoting their ninth full-length album with absolute calm and bass, very low profile.
“Different Breed” is the title of the new work and, as Dagoba uses, the cover artwork is particularly impactful, showcasing a powerful and menacing minotaur: the last two studio efforts, the recent “By Night” (2022 ) and the pre-Covid “Black Nova” (2017), had highlighted the evolution of the Marseille combo in the direction of a modern metal very contaminated by electronics, at times dotted with dubstep arrangements that were a little too out of place. Evidently the response from the public and critics must not have been very popular with Shawter and his companions, in fact “Different Breed” distances itself from the pair of works mentioned previously by recovering the sounds, modern but less mixed with synths and keyboards, which we found on the good side “Tales Of The Black Dawn”, now published almost ten years ago.
Nothing particularly new, therefore, for the quartet, which returns to settle in that limbo of repetitiveness and 'done homework' from which it seems unable to emerge. As has often happened in the career and history of Dagoba, the formality of their good records – with the exception perhaps of “What Hell Is About”, a true masterpiece from the early days – fails to evoke and/or reach exciting qualitative peaks and lasting, leaving to the bitter passage of time the power to judge their efforts successful or not. Also in this “Different Breed” we find the characteristics that have distinguished the band for a long time now, namely the devastating and bombastic production, the versatile use of Shawter's voice, all in all pleasant even in the clean choruses when they pop up here and there, a massive rifframa, not very attackable and breaking your neck in many situations, and an enthralling and devastating drums, capable of leading the whole band on high tracks of epicness and pathos. On the other hand, excluding the three instrumental tracks (“Genes15”, “Léthé” and “Alpha”), perhaps a little too many for a forty-minute disc, the remaining eight episodes flow smoothly and succeed with reasonable sufficiency, between death, groove, thrash metal, a touch of industrial and just enough melodic black metal to fill the songs more oriented towards that side with paroxysmal fury (“Phoenix Noir”, “Cerberus”).
The line-up that has consolidated itself around the singer/guitarist/samples Shawter has arrived at their second work together, so Richard De Mello on second guitar, Kawa Koshigero on bass and Theo on drums can show reliability and precision in chiseling the textures of the Dagoba, who, as written, no longer seem to aspire to unattainable heights of popularity, contenting themselves with a rather humble maneuver among the middle levels of the transalpine scene. So the final advice is very clear: don't expect anything sensational from the French, as even the best songs of the lot – “Minotaur” and “At The End Of The Day” – will seem the same to other songs from the band's past, in a sort of cumbersome and slightly annoying déjà-vu. However, since you are wondering why the vote above is a full seven, despite the distrust that emerges from the words used in this article, we must be completely clear: taken one by one, and extrapolated from the knowledge of the group and from the global context of the album, the tracks of “Different Breed” make a good impression and manage to get more than a smile from him. A band that seems to expect nothing from the future, while we certainly wait for the future to be brighter for them…