Deer Creek is a groovy, crunchy, dirty doom band from Colorado. The band’s label, Game Two, is run by one of the guitarist/singers, and he was kind enough to send me two Deer Creek CDs in the mail for review.
I usually like my doom on the Corrupted, Winter, and Cathedral side of the street, but these folks have a good mix of old-school doom influences, clean vocals, and not playing everything the same for the whole album.
Some doom bands use monotony to create an atmosphere, a drone-y state, which can be OK on album but something that’s hard for me to sit through at a concert. Deer Creek’s first album, Menticide, has six songs, some of which go on for about seven-and-a-half minutes, but the band varies the tempos some and in places adds some groove and some blues, and those are welcome spices to this soup.
The lyrics are consistently a bummer with some effective imagery until we get to “A Dark, Heartless Machine” with lyrics that are of a different style completely, which is odd. Then the final track takes chunks from songs by a number of other bands and stirs them together, a sort of a tribute song I suppose.
Menticide came out in 2022 and is still available on CD, LP, and digital.
The Hiraeth Pit is the band’s second album and it continues in the direction of the first record. “Grey” starts with some sound effects to introduce the first riff, but is the song here that is not like the others lyrically, which again is odd. But this album has seven tracks and contains all of the good points of the first album. The Hiraeth Pit came out last year and it’s also still available on CD, LP, and digital.
So Deer Creek is the kind of band that isn’t stoner (which is a good thing) and, because their influences lean towards older bands, they’re more riffy and have more drum parts than some other bands in the doom genre. Check out both records and see what you like.
Photo: from the band’s Bandcamp
