DATURA4 Demon Dom

Dom Mariani has become something of a local legend with a career spanning over three decades, from the jangly powerpop of The Stems, surf instrumentals with the Majestic Kelp, soulful rock of The Domnicks, and plenty more besides. 

Datura4 is a different beast altogether: an eight-legged riff-heavy monolithic wall of sound that prides itself on musical exploration in worship of the gods of rockin’ boogie. It’s far heavier than people are used to hearing from the local powerpop king.

“Yes, I guess so,” reflects Mariani. “For most people that have followed what I do, yes, they might see it as a little bit of a departure from the kind of pop guitar thing that I’ve been doing over the years - but I’ve been listening to that kind of music pretty much all my life,” he explains. 

“When I was first learning guitar and getting into bands, it was all things like Led Zeppelin and more obscure things like Foghat. Some of the Australian bands that were around at the time were The Zoot and Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs and Buffalo – who I saw when I was in my late teens. I saw them play at The Raffles once.

“I was really into that Aussie blues rock, that progressive blues thing that Lobby Lloyde was doing. I saw him when I was 16 years-old at Fremantle Jail - they came on sort of late afternoon and they kicked off with Johnny Be Goode - and they played it for probably about 15 minutes!”

Old friends Mariani and Hitchcock formed Datura in 2008, enlisting bassist Stu Loasby and drummer Warren Hall to revisit the heavy Aussie blues rock of their youth, and the album sounds like the foursome are revelling in doing so.

“Absolutely! Greg and I enjoy that music - we grew up listening to that stuff and jamming in bands doing that kind of thing,” Mariani explains.

Named after a diabolically toxic hallucinogenic flowering plant, Datura added the ‘4’ to their name after discovering “an Italian electronic band that had a pretty big following, so we didn’t really want to go up against them. “After getting this U.S. label interested in the band,” he explains, “we thought, ‘it’s probably going to get out there, so we need to be different to that’. We looked at other names and thought we’d stick to Datura because we like it.”

Datura4 started recording Demon Blues in 2011, and when finally finished it was quickly snapped up by US label, Alive Naturalsound Records, and is scoring rave reviews around the world. Mariani, though, can’t wait to get back on stage where the songs stretch out in true psych-rock style.

“Oh we’re just really taking it as it comes,” Mariani explains. “At this point in time we’re a bit taken aback by the response, so we don’t really have much management in place or anything like that. We’re just sort of sitting here in Fremantle going, ‘wow, this is all cool, all these nice things that people are saying about us!’ We’ll just see what comes. We haven’t got anything planned other than a few gigs down the track, really. 

Originally published by X-Press Magazine