To put on a Doomtree record is to commit to a certain amount of intense collective energy. Anything much more than that—left-field lyricism, hooks that sink their claws into you, a collection of beats that cohere into some loose future-is-now synthesis of electronic hip-hop—is a bonus, if an expected one. They fly banners in defiance of hierarchies: No Kings embodied that "the biggest thing we rule is ourselves" ethos, where calls to get on their level meant promises of camaraderie more than challenges for competition. And yet they pull weight when they make those calls to arms omnidirectional, ricocheting off each member and filling the room with all these different levels of signal-obscuring noise that make even the matter-of-fact stuff feel enigmatic.
In other words, it's kind of an inner-circle sort of approach, no matter how big that circle's designed to get. A big-in-Minnesota cult act that's taken both local roots and global possibilities to heart, Doomtree's hard-earned success has built-in safeguards against complacency and predictability. For one thing, the youth-movement energy in their music remains even as their early thirties are settling in; last December's tenth annual weeklong Twin Cities-wide "Doomtree Blowout" was declared their last not out of encroaching middle-age burnout but because "we got to thinking about how incredibly lame and boring the idea of ever throwing a Blowout 11 sounded." And their new album All Hands bears out some of that urge to hit a reset button that doubles as a fast-forward.
Written in a cabin with dicey-at-best cellular reception, All Hands feels cut off from most of the world outside their own universe. It's a blessing and a curse keeping a collaborative relationship between seven different artists—with five of them being MCs, and two of those MCs contributing beats alongside their two regular producers, it's both kind of amazing and really understandable how they've all been able to both maintain and move ahead without imploding after more than a decade. The complementary pieces are all keystones here, and stylistic variety—the focused punk-vibe grit-and-grind of P.O.S., Dessa's smooth venom, Cecil Otter reining in agitation, Sims and Mike Mictlan rounding out the rewind-demanding punchline barrage—is what keeps the album alive even when the words start to blur.
Which they do, often. You can pick out the mood-setting references if you want: "Final Boss" has Sims paraphrasing The Karate Kid and finding stressed empathy with decline-era Kobe; P.O.S steers the vigilante study ".38 Airweight" with the art-imitates-life-imitates-art invocation of Bernhard Goetz and Charles Bronson (the latter not for the first time); Dessa rattles through a breathless itinerary on "The Bends" that sounds like instructions to an undercover fugitive. But each line feels more like a disconnected thought strung together in a more allusive whole, where you get the gist but still have to coax out the depth. "Gray Duck" alone is layers upon injokes upon regionalisms—the title's a reference to the Minnesota-specific variant on the childrens' game "duck duck goose", which in itself stands for their own ready-to-bolt restlessness, and it's filtered through everything from P.O.S.'s strength-through-confrontation approach ("All the fuck in your station/ All up in your dark/ Awkward in your Marc Maron conversations/ Call 'em out the park") to Dessa's elemental momentum ("Sparks on the pavement, dragging the chain/ Anchor's off, man, lost it again") to Sims' dichotomy-driven jokes ("I'm really real, half Built to Spill half Kill at Will").
So as you draw in messages that are more atmospheric than direct, there's still the allure of soaking in this music as music, all those contrasting voices turning comfortable truisms into uncomfortable knots. Voices harmonize in pop-punk-adjacent indie-anthem hooks. Lazerbeak and Paper Tiger (alongside Cecil and P.O.S.) deliver serrated, drum-splintering minor-key threat-beats fresh from the Neo Geo Orchestra. And the whole thing doesn't relieve the pressure on your chest until the vapor-trail comedown of closer "Marathon", which pares back the hovering-mothership menace just enough to reveal that this isn't music made to be stripped for parts: "When it all boils down, there's nothin' but bones left."
