Band:	Dool
Album:	The Shape Of Fluidity
Style:	Gothic rock, Psychedelic rock
Release date:	April 19, 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Venus In Flames
02. Self-Dissect
03. The Shape Of Fluidity
04. Currents
05. Evil In You
06. House Of A Thousand Dreams
07. Hermagorgon
08. Hymn For A Memory Lost
09. The Hand Of Creation

Now that I'm done regretting the Roadburn sets I didn't see, there were some ones I do cherish seeing. Some of those ones have been sets of bands playing then upcoming albums in full. One of those was Dool's The Shape Of Fluidity.

Alright, alright, I admit it. I didn't see all of the set, but that's just because how Roadburn is, by nature, full of clashes, some of which are just partial clashes. Simply put, I also wanted to see Xiu Xiu, who would play in a much smaller stage and it would start sometimes during Dool's set. Sure, with hindsight I could've left even later or even made a different decision, but I have seen about half of The Shape Of Fluidity performed live. The first half more precisely. Even with multiple listens I'm not fully sure which of the songs was the last that I caught live (if I had to bet it would be "House of a Thousand Dreams"), but quite a few of the ones I have seen and especially the title track I've had immediate familiarity with upon listening to the full album.

In my previous interaction with Dool I mainly compared them to the two other Dutch bands they have or had lineup connections with, The Devil's Blood and Gggolddd, both of which are bands that are clearly not metal, but whose rock sound is not only appealing to the heavier listening crowd, and also a bit hard to properly categorize. There haven't been fundamental changes in Dool's sound, still playing an amalgamation of rock sounds that could be described as both psychedelic and gothic but without really fitting among either crowds. Too dark to be psych, to light to be goth. All that energy that could've been spent adhering to subgenre conventions was instead spent writing some damn good songs.

The best word I'd use to describe the songwriting is still "lush", creating some warm and airy ambiance while keeping a lot of the songwriting hook-focused, whether that's through the riffing or through Raven van Dorst's vocals, thus a lot of what I really like about the record comes down to this balance between eclectic in its sounds and direct and accessible in structure. The dynamics are perhaps most obvious in "Hermagorgon", a song where the riffing around the chorus is the closest the band got to metal, while the rest of the song also includes some of the album's sparsest and subtlest moments. The vocal performance does have a couple of spots where the tone of Raven's voice feels a bit obnoxious, like the very first vocal lines in the opener (not a good first impression, I assume), thus each listen requires me to attune to them, but then I can't imagine anyone else singing these songs, especially considering the themes are tied to how the band slipped away from the "female-fronted" classification without changing the lineup.

I'm glad I did get to see however much of this performed live that I got to see, and I'm glad most of the energy of that performance translated well into studio. The Shape Of Fluidity is a really strong batch of songs, perhaps some of the band's best.