Released on vinyl only in the US by White Denim (excellent indie label run out of Philadelphia by Matthew K of Pissed Jeans), All Hell is out now in Australia & New Zealand on CD, vinyl and digital by Mistletone Records / Inertia. You can mail order the CD here.

Download: “In The Beginning” from Mistletone Soundcloud

• “Philadelphia singer Daughn Gibson was once a truck driver. It’s a biographical detail that informs All Hell’s odd brew of country croon, plinking saloon piano, evangelist Christian interludes and tales of good families gone bad: a patchwork of influences you could probably only encounter zig-zagging across interstates from sea to shining sea, probably on the radio, probably late at night. Lookin’ Back on ’99 is a slinky slice of noir pop while Dandelions makes bedfellows of Johnny Cash’s croon with Dan Deacon’s deranged electronica. Gibson’s baritone steals the show, most often reminiscent of Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields or Sydney’s Jack Ladder but most beautiful when he channels Arthur Russell’s fey wonderment, as he does on the tear-streaked Tiffany Lou.” – SYDNEY MORNING HERALD (4 stars)
  
• “Daughn Gibson’s debut album is a rare hybrid of experimental pop and traditional Americana. With a resonant vocal style, Daughn crafts concise narratives with memorable melodies. Musically All Hell draws upon shadowy country rock and southern gothic elements, and interpolates them into spacious, minimalist electronic arrangements. Lee Hazelwood and Burial, Nick Cave and Nicholas Jaar, are equally applicable reference points for the album’s surprising, and engaging sound.” – 3RRR ALBUM OF THE WEEK
• “Pennsylvania native Daughn Gibson is an artist who has seemingly appeared fully formed out of nowhere. The most unique thing about his debut album is the way it morphs between different styles, often from quite different realms such as country and soulful electronica, yett it somehow all hangs together wonderfully. As a result Gibson paints himself as a fascinating, chameleon-like musician. Possessing a deep and defiantly masculine voice, Gibson has the ability to frame it in rather sensitive surrounds. On opening track, Bad Guys, he is the outlaw country crooner, almost Elvis-like in the way he curls his baritone vowels. In The Beginning brings to mind our own Jack Ladder while Tiffany Lou has a distinct English bent, akin to the artful indie guitar pop of Wild Beasts. The unifying factor is of course his voice and he isn’t afraid to experiment with it via the stuttering effects on Tiffany Lou or lay it open and bare like Johnny Cash on the late-night jazz intoxication of A Young Girl’s World. There isn’t a weak track across the 30-minute album and squeezing such a wide range of songs onto it is a major achievement. Lookin’ Back On ’99 sounds like a lost Depeche Mode gem with its wobbly trip hop bass, while Gibson introduces more experimental touches with static interjections on Dandelions and the screaming-in-your-face dynamics that kick off the closing title track. It sounds like Jim Morrison duetting with a goth band circa 1984. As far as debut albums go this is up there with the best and though distinctly different it feels like an introduction to a impressive new talent, in much the same way Bon Iver appeared with his debut” – THEMUSIC.COM.AU
• “Daughn Gibson started plying his trade as part of a stoner-metal trio, yet in solo form he rides a horse, albeit a forlorn, skeletal one. In monochrome. In a rustic steampunk Western desert. In a parallel universe. So is the reaction of his debut All Hell that it can’t be helped but to think that Gibson is fucking with us. Starting out with the low, brow-beaten country of Bad Guys, All Hell changes tack considerably from the heavily sampled and eloquent croon of In The Beginning. It is the distorting and elongation of the vocals on tracks such as Tiffany Lou that evokes darkwave terrain, a windswept number that wouldn’t be out of place scoring an attempt at a love story by David Lynch. Rain On A Highway seems disingenuous, like Johnny Cash recorded on a green screen. The Day You Were Born is Tom T Hall, slowed by 200%, on peyote. Nothing is at it seems – yet this is Gibson’s world, and he’ll be damned if he’ll construct something that’s easy to take part in. The scary thing is, All Hell is actually very good. Despite its scattered, disparate elements, Gibson infuses it with so much of his own personality that there are commonalities that exist that allow these tracks to hold sway, gelling together in a cohesive way that on paper is inconceivable. All Hell isn’t likely to take the world by storm, yet – just like compatriots King Dude and, to a lesser extent, Aussie Jack Ladder and his latest opus Hurtsville – he has painted a niche that is infinitely interesting despite its genre trappings.” – STREET PRESS AUSTRALIA
• “The words ‘sample-based’ and ‘country’, at least in a musical context, don’t sit together easily on paper. But a good deal of the charm of All Hell, Daughn Gibson’s début solo album, is how effectively and easily he charts a course between these two musical poles. Gibson – of on-again off-again Pennsylvania stoner metal bros Pearls & Brass – crafts a kind of dissolute narrative-focused music by singing over looped snippets of sampled country tunes. In terms of aesthetics, this is actually a genius call: Gibson can take the best parts of country music while dodging its clichés. Sonically, there’s an odd tension between the analogue nature of the source material – rich and warm with layers of vinyl crackles and 78 RPM shellac scratchiness – and the digital artefacts introduced by the sampling process (listen to the stretched-out splash cymbals of opener Bad Guys, which sound ready to burst apart and dissolve into the ether). Gibson deserves credit simply for avoiding All Hell descending into a hot mess. He achieves this partly through his vocal versatility – on In The Beginning his vocal performance ranges from cheesy Elvis-lite baritone croon to ‘80s pop-rock mellifluousness. Another selling point is his instinctive grasp on what country music offers its listeners – his songs are about the losers and the unlucky ones, those stuck in dead-end situations or crushed by their futile attempts to escape them. It’s a weird, hermetic musical universe that takes some effort to crack, but there are riches inside for those with the patience to look.” – RAVE MAGAZINE

Imagine if Nicolas Jaar edited together a cocaine-country album, with a crooner somewhere between Lee Hazelwood and Roy Orbison on the mic. You know how James Blake brought R&B into the post-techno age? That’s what Daughn Gibson is fixing to do with country.

Shades of Arthur Russell, Scott Walker, Magnetic Fields and Matthew Dear might pop up here or there, but this is a work unlike any other.

Daughn Gibson’s debut album All Hell is one of the catchiest, most infectious Mistletone releases to date; a spooky, atmospheric slice of electronically enhanced backwoods creepiness. Surrounded by echoed electric guitar, sinister rhythm patterns, and cutting synth, Daughn unfurls his unsettling, elliptical tales in a gritty baritone.

Street Press Australia Feature: Cult Classics

Erstwhile truck driver Daughn Gibson tells Doug Wallen he wanted to make country music, but things got weird along the way

It reads like the setup of a failed joke: What happens when the truck-driving drummer of a stoner band turns to country? Not only is that premise real, but Pennsylvania’s Daughn Gibson spun his circumstances into a head-turning, genre-fusing debut with All Hell. Bringing together his love of country songs with his natural baritone croon and a stack of samples from op-shop religious records, Gibson has made his very own strain of R&B-twisted outsider music.

Not that he set out to do that, exactly. “I always wanted to do straight country,” he confesses. “In a small way, this was my attempt to do it. It just came out weird. If you want to be in a country group, you need players. And nobody I know really wants to play that kind of music. So it forces you to figure out a new way.”

Gibson turned to the sample-based electronic music he’d always tinkered with on the side, using those resources to flesh out his ostensible country project. Without a proper band, he casually grabbed drumbeats and bass lines from old vinyl. The results are just as organic, from the forlorn twang and tentative rhythms of opener Bad Guys to the poppy loop anchoring The Day You Were Born. Even with his froggy voice and dark country themes, the album is quite accessible. Especially the deceptively hooky In the Beginning, with its female vocal sample lifted straight from the record bins at a Salvation Army store.

“A lot of them are Pennsylvania Christian records. Some reverend’s recording studio,” he muses. “There’s a certain feel that’s so interesting. It’s like a church basement. I’d say 90% is garbage, but then you spin one and it’s so bizarre and totally captivating. That sample was just another in a stack of family gospel. Those girls sound like aliens. There’s a weird alien/cult thing going on with all those records. They breed out of isolation, so you get really fucked-up things.”

Having grown up between Philadelphia and New York City in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, Gibson now divides his time between Philly and Carlisle, a humble uni town where he’s lived with his wife for about six years. “She’s from Carlisle,” he explains, “so we came home to visit. I was like, ‘This is a great town. Let’s move here.’ That’s it. There were really no jobs here.” Laughing, he continues, “It’s just a good area: nothing goin’ on, and I like it like that. I think the college keeps the town from looking like other Pennsylvania towns. [Most] Pennsylvania towns, it’s like industrial fallout, unless you’re near Philly or Pittsburgh.”

While he’s had his commercial driver’s license for a decade, Gibson doesn’t drive trucks fulltime anymore. But he still picks up the odd driving job when he can, and that line of work is where he nurtured his fondness for country music. That includes the kind of character songs echoed in his own tunes Tiffany Lou and Ray.

“Country music, to me, was the one genre that focused on that stuff,” he argues. “I like to read, I like stories. This is the best of both worlds: you get to listen to somebody’s account of either themselves or somebody else, put to melody. They have to get their character portrayal down in a couple lines, so that makes more of an impact because you’re not hearing all these fine details. You’re just getting the meat and potatoes of what makes a person awful or heroic or sad.”

Now that his on-off stoner band Pearls & Brass is more off than on, Gibson is developing a live setup for his solo work. So far it’s a duo with him on keyboards plus a guitarist. While he hopes to tour Australia someday, all things in due time. “The plan is just to grow and have fun and get other people in,” he says simply, “but at our own pace.”

Pitchfork Rising Feature: 

Harrowing small-town tales from a Pennsylvania punk-turned-crooner, by Larry Fitzmaurice