Doug MacDonald Band: “Drawbridge Troll” – garage rock and indie motifs
Doug MacDonald embarked on his musical in 2005, equipped with an acoustic guitar he performed his own songs on the Boston club circuit. After a 3-year stint doing the local rounds Doug decided to take his act to another level by adding a drummer. Fate would have it that Patty Short, was between bands, and on the lookout for an opportunity to apply her skills behind the kit, as well as someone she could mesh with musically. After seeing Doug perform one evening, the two hit it off and they immediately began fine-tuning their repertoire before hitting the local scene as the Doug MacDonald Band. In 2012 they released their debut album which made a splash on college radio. The duo followed that up with two more albums in 2013 and 2014, before releasing their latest album entitled “Lightning Head”.
Taken off the same album comes the single, “Drawbridge Troll”. Traditional garage rock and indie motifs abound here, the angular guitar riffs crackle with apocalyptic fury, the track is shrouded in dark ambience, and Doug’s vocal is deliciously otherworldly.
He sounds simultaneously impassioned yet indifferent; emotive yet also strangely disconnected. His voice is rich and as if weathered by time and tide from the constant late nights playing the bar circuit.
“Drawbridge Troll” is a sleek, swirling, gradually escalating garage monster that should have you somersaulting around your bedroom within 60 seconds of pressing play.
In a world where almost everything comes with inverted commas and ambiguous schematics, this track deals in shameless indie-rock. It’s refreshing, in a pretentious, but charming middle-finger-to-the-naysayers way.
The Doug MacDonald Band sound like a band honing in on their skill rather than overhauling what they do, and in the grand scheme of their career this feels a timely release. “Drawbridge Troll” is the kind of piercing, direct and honest alternative rock delineation that we need to be seeing from this genre again.
They’re expertly pitching this somewhere between wistfulness and disdainfulness; the vernacular of it all feels like they’re genuinely great at working together and they have the right emotional temperament from the beginning.
Jarring guitar licks and menacing percussion explicitly clear that the Doug MacDonald Band have unraveled the conundrum of less is more, setting the tone of the single with elegiac guitars swelling into anthemic territory, moored by Doug’s high-pitched vocals and the energetic drumming pieced together by Patty.
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