LOTTO by They Are Gutting a Body of Water
As head of the label Julia’s War, Doug Dulgarian has helped spread indie-rock bulletins via early releases from bands like Feeble Little Horse and Wednesday. As head of They Are Gutting a Body of Water (TAGABOW), a solo project turned shoegaze band, he spreads darkness.
On the latest TAGABOW full-length, LOTTO, Dulgarian remains the lead singer, and sometimes just the lead talker: well into the swirl of guitar distortion, menacing rhythmic trudge and gut-rattling bass of the opening track, “The Chase,” he recites a story not unlike the gimlet-eyed, street-level future shock from cyberpunk writer Richard K. Morgan.
When he does sing, Dulgarian recalls a particular and peculiar era of alt-rock singers lumped together as “grunge,” including the late Kurt Cobain, Bush’s Gavin Rossdale and, most of all, Failure’s Ken Andrews. Dulgarian and Andrews share the ability to express contradictory emotional turmoil—too introverted to reach out and too needful of human contact not to—while holding a melody.
His guitar, PJ Carroll’s guitar, Emily Lofing’s bass, and Ben Opatut’s drums deepen the connections to Failure, or the angrier side of the Posies. The cranked-toward-overdriven riffs of “RL Stine” and the grinding forced march of “Sour Diesel” prove that grunge and shoegaze can still be smelted together with impressive heft.
Yet TAGABOW has previously made great use of technology, particularly on 2022’s Lucky Styles, and the immediate and live-to-tape focus of LOTTO doesn’t prevent the group from tangents like “Chrises Head,” a one-minute, seven-second electronic simulation of a spooky child’s religious chant, or Dulgarian’s pitch-shifted vocals in the softer sections of “American Food.”
Tech and naturalism, in the forms of synths and riffs, have a blast on the final track, “Herpim,” and LOTTO often sounds exhaled as much as produced. Dulgarian and TAGABOW spread light through the darkness, too.
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