Bandcamp Call an album Doppelgänger and you are inviting the obvious question of how many faces the thing actually has. Go Mahhh, an international four-piece who assembled in Berlin and put this debut out through Noisolution, answer with eight songs that rarely sound like they came off the same band on first listen. “High Mountain” opens in a dusty stoner-doom haze, a long atmospheric intro before a rotten fuzz bass takes the floor. Two tracks later “Happy Satan’s Reign” is a fast, wah-soaked sixties burner with a noise-rock snarl. “Anatoliosis” runs Indian tabla under wiry fuzz guitars, “BBSBBQ” goes wide and almost industrial, and “Mind Assault - The Road” closes on a seven-minute hypnotic crawl that sounds like post-punk that wandered into a stoner jam. The shapeshifting is the point.
What keeps it from scattering is the sound. This is one of the more honest-sounding debuts I’ve heard this year, recorded dry and warm with a mid-forward vintage character and, crucially, a master that refuses the loudness war. The dynamics are intact. Leonard Traynor’s vocals (he also plays guitar and, on “Blood Transfusion,” flute) sit embedded in the band rather than perched on top of it, rasped and half-buried in the mids the way the best fuzz records keep them. Cash Hutchinson’s drums are close-miked and unprocessed, the kick light on sub but tight, the snare a woody crack. And the bass, fat and rude and slightly distorted, is the real lead instrument here, carrying the riff on “Happy Satan’s Reign” and “Anatoliosis” while the guitars scrape around it.
Where the seams show
The flip side of a band wearing this many faces is that not all of them fit equally well. “The Sun King” leans into a denser, more compressed wall and starts to fatigue before it ends, the one moment the record reaches for the loudness it otherwise avoids. And the warm, mid-heavy approach has a recurring cost: the low mids stack up. On “High Mountain,” “Blood Transfusion” and “MSAZ-20” the bass and the bottom of the guitars congeal into one thick band, and a little of the detail goes with it. For a live-sounding fuzz record that murk is half the charm and half the limitation, depending on the track.
The eclecticism cuts both ways too. The range is genuinely exciting, but across forty minutes it can read as a band still trying on identities rather than settling one, and a listener who came for the stoner haze of the opener might not follow them all the way into the noise-rock and post-hardcore detours. The confidence is never in doubt. The focus, on a debut, still is.
The thing you notice first is what the album doesn’t do: it doesn’t crush itself. The master keeps real dynamic range, analog and warm, mid-forward, with the highs rolled back rather than chasing brilliance, and that single decision is most of why a record this raw still sounds good loud. The bass leads, rotten and fuzzed and precisely located, carrying riffs the wiry guitars decorate rather than dominate. Drums are dry and close, organic, kick tight but light on the very bottom, snare a hard woody pop. The vocals, rasped and shouted, are mixed into the band, blending instead of floating on top, which costs some intelligibility and buys a lot of cohesion. The recurring weakness is low-mid stacking, bass and low guitars overlapping into a single thick zone that steals transparency on the densest tracks, and a touch of high-mid harshness when “The Sun King” pushes hardest.
Standout tracks: Happy Satan’s Reign for the wah-driven sixties charge and the best groove on the record. Anatoliosis for the tabla-and-fuzz idea that no one else is doing quite like this. Mind Assault - The Road for the long hypnotic build that shows where the band’s patience can take them.
Eight faces, one very good amp room. Doppelgänger is the rare debut where the production is already a strength and the writing has range to spare, held to three stars by a low-mid murk that thickens the densest tracks and a restlessness that hasn’t yet decided which Go Mahhh is the real one. That last part is a good problem to have. Whichever face they pick next, this is a band Berlin’s psych scene should be loud about.
