It is not very often that I get to see bands a couple of times in short succession, I’d rather see as many as possible rather than a few many times. So it was interesting for me to see Cult of Dom Keller (CODK) at Sheffield’s Detestival Festival so quickly after having seen them in Leeds about a fortnight earlier.
Granted it was a different setting, whereas they were headlining their own gig in Leeds, the band were doing a half hour set at 6pm at Detestival. I think that this must be quite a difficult thing to do, playing to people who are unfamiliar with your music for such a short period of time, at a time when the sun is still shining outside. Given these circumstances I thought that CODK delivered a really good set with tracks from both their excellent albums (CODK & The Second Bardo), ‘Eyes’ and ‘Nowhere To Land’ being particularly good to my ears.
I hope that this does not sound negative because, especially with psych music, you are never going to achieve the same intensity in 30 minutes as you will over a headlining set, since bands like CODK need to build up the layers of experience throughout the set. So the only disappointment for me was that their time on stage was far too short, I found that I was just getting into the whole experience when it was over, having just lost myself in the CODK trip.
As I went out into the Sheffield sunshine I somehow felt a jolt back into reality, and that what I had just witnessed seemed a bit of a dream, a fleeting psychedelic journey that melted away as quickly as it emerged.
It was raw, it was trippy, it was exciting: it was Cult of Dom Keller.
You can find more Psych Insights by Simon Delic here.
