Dorothy Fuzz Run Devil Run! cassette
Two-piece recording project from out in La La Land, Los Angeles, California. Across seven tracks, DOROTHY FUZZ delivers lo-fi garage punk with a heavy reliance on toy synthesizers. Does that make it synthwave? I’m skeptical, but I don’t think I really care either way. What becomes impossible to ignore is the lack of rhythmic variation on this cassette. Every song uses the standard basic rock beat, programmed into a drum machine and left to run without a single fill, break, or change. In fact, the beat often keeps going even after the rest of the instruments have dropped out, continuing until someone finally switches the machine off. The most interesting moment comes with “Is That All There Is?,” which trades the grunge-inspired barked singing for spoken word storytelling over that same unchanging beat and a simple bass groove. However, at more than six minutes in length, that novelty starts to wear thin. Oddly enough, the track “Running, Running” somehow feels even longer with how grating and repetitive it is. Two-and-a-half minutes has never felt so long. After all the questions posed on “Is That All There Is?” and once the tape had finished, I was left with a question of my own: is that all there is to making music? Is that really all there is to being a band?