|
Danava are pretty unique for sounding at times like every different flavor of heavy metal from the entire decade of the 70's....plus elements of "glam" and "space" in there.
I first saw them in November of 2004 when they were touring with Glass Candy, and they practically made my jaw hit the floor. I picked up their four-song demo CDR and everything else on their merch table, including the LP by the pre-Danava band called Princess Sweepstakes, which became my #1 favorite thing of 2004. Everyone in Danava was in Princess Sweepstakes, but there was this other dude named Zac (as opposed to Zack who is a different guy in both bands) who split from Portland after Princess Sweepstakes and moved down here to Sacto and later formed Who's Your Favorite Son, God? and records solo as Hexlove and/or Faulouah...all of which have provided some excellent moments. Princess Sweepstakes was a very different beast from Danava....sounds like they coulda come out on Ralph Records 30 years ago! If you were to plot the Residents, Chrome, and Pere Ubu on a graph, Princess Sweepstakes would be in the middle of that triangle somewhere shading a bit toward the Residents' point. Apparently, they've played a reunion show very recently.....wish I'd known...I woulda certainly driven the 600 miles to Portland to see that. (Call me crazy!)
There's another band in this family tree called Willow Bay which is pretty much the same membership as Princess Sweepstakes doing some even weirder shit. A little more electronics creeps in, and you can hear Zac making his mark unmistakable.
There's actually about a dozen bands in this family tree leading back to all of these bands' Midwestern roots. All of the bands have CDR releases on a label called Scenery Audio Archive which is like some crazy deep wellspring of weird flavors of psychedelia. Sounds mostly like stuff on Paw Tracks, but heavier at times and a lot more intensely personal.
Another splendid side band of Danava is Dogbite 65. I heard a CDR-EP of them called Motorbike Poop a few years back which sounds like someone jammed Hampton Grease Band and Caroliner all day, took some really good drugs, but stayed firmly enough on the ground just to be able to nail a good chunky riff in time.
Zac released a Scenery sampler CDR comp of sorts not quite two years ago called Flat Gettin' It, and it had even more solo stuff by various members of the Princess Sweepstakes/Danava family tree, including Buck Rothy, who was (still is?) on the same radio station as Dead-Air.
|