Celebrity Therapist

Atlanta noise rock band The Callous Daoboys launch their third album into the zeitgeist, Celebrity Therapist.

The Callous Daoboys create music that is rather hard to define, despite the labels of metalcore and mathcore often applied to their output. It is unpredictable one song to the next, and also one bar to the next in any given song. There are sometimes long melodic passages – entire songs, even – and along the way there is prominent disruption. They have released two previous full-length albums so far, Animal Tetris (2017) and Die on Mars (2019), plus an EP right before the inaugural debut. The musicians are Carson Pace (vocals), Maddie Caffrey (guitar), Dan Hodsdon (guitar), Jack Buckalew (bass), Amber Christman (violin), and Sam Williamson (drums).

“Violent Astrology” wakes you up and directs your attention to what is about to happen. Noise, chaos, screaming, music. It might not seem like it at first, but there is a lot here that owes a debt to Zappa, and that is where the biggest appeal lies for me. There is a great deal of unexpectedness throughout, not the least of which is the melodic passage that coalesces from the midst of the violent careening. You have some thinking to do if you want to gather your thoughts on this song, or any of the others in the set.

Reviewing this music is a rather fruitless endeavor, in the end. What shall I do? Try to describe the weirdness? My mission here is merely to make you aware of the album’s existence. Across the eight tracks on the album, there are a multitude of samples and grabs, arranged in an aggressively artful way among the vocals and instrumentations. The work is frenzied and appears on the surface to be disordered, but it isn’t. I am not sure it makes much sense to look for patterns, exactly, but there certainly is an extraordinary amount of expression going on. If you like this sort of sound in the first place, and/or you are up for a challenge, then go ahead and press play.