Bandcamp Three singles came out before this album, in August, September and September again: “Marathon”, “Obelisk”, “Schaufel”. On the record they sit at positions four, six and one. Line them up against the finished sequence and you learn something about how the band hears itself, because “Obelisk” is the most open thing here and “Schaufel” is the tightest and brightest, and they picked both.
Dübel are three people from Worms playing instrumental stoner rock, and there is no singer, no sample, no guest, nothing to hide behind. Twenty nine minutes, seven tracks, and the whole thing rests on whether the riffs carry.
The record opens up as it goes
The first three tracks are built close. “Schaufel”, “Drehmaschine” and “Pusher” run hard and flat, sitting high in the treble with the bass packed in underneath, and they move as a block. From “Marathon” onward the band lets go. The distance between the quiet and the loud passages opens up by about two thirds across the back four, and the two groups do not overlap at any point: the tightest of the late tracks is still wider than the loosest of the early ones.
Underneath that, the weight shifts out of the bottom octave and into the range just above it, where a guitar actually sings. That second movement is less tidy than the first, the bottom end wanders rather than falling in a straight line, but the direction over the record is clear enough to hear. A debut that arrives with a shape already in mind is rarer than it should be in this idiom, where the usual plan is seven variations on the best riff.
What that costs
The front third pays for it. “Schaufel” is a good opener in isolation, but following it with two more tracks built at the same tension means the album spends nearly a third of its length before it shows what it can do. On a record this short that is a lot of patience to ask for, and some listeners will have decided what Dübel are by then.
There is also the thing instrumental records cannot avoid. With no voice to mark a chorus, the job of telling you where you are falls entirely to the riff, and across the tighter tracks a few of them pass without leaving a mark. The back half does not have this problem: “Obelisk” and “Labyrinth” both have a clear idea and give it room, and “Labyrinth” earns its clean opening by what it does immediately after.
So
Recommended, without much hedging. This is a confident debut from a band that knows the difference between heavy and loud, it does not outstay its welcome, and the arc through the running order is deliberate enough to reward a second listen in a way the individual riffs do not always manage on the first. The reservation is the opening third, which is the least interesting part of the record and also the part everyone hears first. Start at “Obelisk” if you want to know whether this is for you, then go back to track one and hear it as the build it is meant to be.
The record splits three against four. Across “Schaufel”, “Drehmaschine” and “Pusher” the distance between quiet and loud passages runs 5.0, 5.9 and 5.5 decibels; across “Marathon”, “Öl”, “Obelisk” and “Labyrinth” it runs 7.6, 8.8, 10.4 and 9.7, with no overlap between the two groups and an album median of 7.6. The band between two hundred and fifty and eight hundred hertz rises almost without interruption, 12.4, 14.9, 13.9, 14.1, 14.8, 16.2 and 16.7 percent, with a single step back at track three. The bottom band under two hundred and fifty hertz is noisier and steps back three times, but it averages 29.4 percent over the first three tracks against 26.8 over the last four. Nothing is squashed. Crest values hold between 13.3 and 15.7 decibels above average and average levels between minus 14.5 and minus 16.9, which puts the album eighth of the 48 on peak to average distance and seventh on how quietly it is mastered. There is a lot of room left here. “Schaufel” is the outlier at the top: a tonal centre of 3008 hertz against 2357 to 2832 for everything else, and 27.3 percent of its energy above five kilohertz. “Labyrinth” has the highest crest and the lowest average level on the album, which is what a track with a quiet opening looks like from here.
Standout tracks: Obelisk, Labyrinth, Öl
