Album Review: Daughn Gibson - All Hell

Daughn Gibson started plying his trade as part of a stoner-metal trio, yet in solo form he rides a horse, albeit a forlorn, skeletal one. In monochrome. In a rustic steampunk Western desert. In a parallel universe.

So is the reaction of his debut All Hell that it can't be helped but to think that Gibson is fucking with us. Starting out with the low, brow-beaten country of Bad Guys, All Hell changes tack considerably from the heavily sampled and eloquent croon of In The Beginning. It is the distorting and elongation of the vocals on tracks such as Tiffany Lou that evokes darkwave terrain, a windswept number that wouldn't be out of place scoring an attempt at a love story by David Lynch. Rain On A Highway seems disingenuous, like Johnny Cash recorded on a green screen. The Day You Were Born is Tom T Hall, slowed by 200%, on peyote. Nothing is at it seems – yet this is Gibson's world, and he'll be damned if he'll construct something that's easy to take part in.

The scary thing is, All Hell is actually very good. Despite its scattered, disparate elements, Gibson infuses it with so much of his own personality that there are commonalities that exist that allow these tracks to hold sway, gelling together in a cohesive way that on paper is inconceivable. All Hell isn't likely to take the world by storm, yet – just like compatriots King Dude and, to a lesser extent, Aussie Jack Ladder and his latest opus Hurtsville – he has painted a niche that is infinitely interesting despite its genre trappings.