Bandcamp The Dharma Chain started life in Byron Bay and decamped to Berlin at the end of 2022, and Some Kind Of Pure State sounds like a band that took the move as a creative reset. Their second album was tracked live over ten days at Funkhaus, and that working method is the whole point: this is a record built on the push and pull of a room, krautrock pulse underneath, shoegaze haze on top, post-punk cold running through the middle.
What makes it work is how rarely the band lets the haze go static. “Loves Confusion” sets the template, a clean guitar figure that opens out into the full ensemble with the dynamics left genuinely intact, no loudness-war flattening, the kind of natural concert-hall give that most modern productions sand off. “Red Red Red Red Red” leans further toward post-punk and dream-pop, a tight rhythm section holding a knurled, well-defined low end while the guitars pile into a saturated wall above it. The vocals stay buried in delay and reverb throughout, less a frontline instrument than another layer of weather, and on the quieter tracks that ethereal placement is exactly right.
The eight-and-a-half-minute “Cross Over” is where they show the full range, an almost naked intro of clean guitar and delay taps that climbs, patiently, into an eruptive wall-of-sound finale without ever dropping the thread. It is the most post-metal moment here, and it earns its length. When the band pushes into heavier territory the seams start to show: the densest climaxes stack up in the low mids, guitars and bass competing for the same frequencies until the rhythm section loses a little definition. It is the one recurring flaw, and it is the price of doing shoegaze this loud rather than a failure of taste.
Across the record the contrast does the heavy lifting, intimate, almost electronic verses against those flooded refrains, and the band trusts that contrast enough to let the soft passages breathe. Some Kind Of Pure State is a confident, atmospheric second album from a group that found something in the move north, and it holds together as a single immersive run far better than most genre-hopping records have any right to.
A dense, reverb-soaked blend of neo-psychedelia, shoegaze, krautrock and post-punk, built on the contrast between intimate, almost electronic verses and flooded wall-of-sound refrains. The production keeps a natural, airy live feel and, on the strongest tracks (“Loves Confusion”, “Red Red Red Red Red”, “Cross Over”), the dynamics are left genuinely intact rather than flattened for loudness. The vocals sit deep in delay and reverb as another atmospheric layer rather than a frontline. The recurring weakness is frequency stacking in the low mids when the full arrangement hits: guitars and bass crowd the same range and the rhythm section loses some definition in the densest climaxes. Immersive and dynamic, with a slightly congested low end at full tilt.
Standout tracks: Cross Over, Loves Confusion, Red Red Red Red Red
