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New Music Review: TUMBLEWEED DEALER ‘Dark Green’

TUMBLEWEED DEALER 'Dark Green' - COVER PHOTO

Rating: 8 / 10 Stars

TUMBLEWEED DEALER is: Seb Painchaud (bass, guitars), Angelo Fata (drums, percussion), Jean-Baptiste Joubaud (synths, programming)

GUEST MUSICIANS: Antoine Baril (mellotron, hammond organ, keyboards), Guillaume Audette (wurlitzer, rhodes, church organ), Jocelyn Couture (trumpet, flugel horn), Loïc Roy-Turgeon (trombone), Zach Strouse (saxophone), Ceschi Ramos (vocals)

REVIEW – Eight years is a long time between albums. For most bands, it signals either reinvention or resurrection. But for TUMBLEWEED DEALER, ‘DARK GREEN’ is something stranger—it’s a slow-boiling mutation, an unrecognizable organism grown from their desert-doom roots into something cinematic, swampy, psychedelic, and disarmingly sincere.

Due out on February 7th, 2025, ‘DARK GREEN’ doesn’t pick up where their last record left off—it digs a completely new trench through murky, uncharted territory. It’s an album less interested in pleasing expectations and more concerned with absorbing you into its world—a humid, mind-bending vision of bogs, bayous, ghostly vegetation, and jazz-laced paranoia. The concept? Think Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing retold as a prog-jazz fever dream. And just like its namesake, ‘DARK GREEN’ is amorphous, rooted in earth and myth, yet curiously alive.

“A Distant Figure in the Fog” sets the tone—not just as an opener, but as a mood-setting spell. Mellotron choirs and glacial guitar lines swirl like fog in low tide, and right away it’s clear: this isn’t your typical stoner rock record. The band’s trademark bluesy riffwork still lurks in the background, but it’s now blanketed under layers of ambient haze, analog textures, and understated orchestration.

From there, ‘DARK GREEN’ pulses forward like a swamp current, dragging you into pieces like “Sparks Adrift in the Louisiana Nightsky” and “Becoming One with the Bayou”, which feel more like scores to lost Southern Gothic films than traditional songs. Horns creep in like alligators at dusk. Retro organs swell like sunlit humidity. The rhythms shift, morph, and reappear in warped mirror-images of themselves. At times it recalls the cinematic creep of GOBLIN or the jazz-rock unraveling of KING CRIMSON, but never in a way that feels borrowed. It’s not homage. It’s hallucination.

Then comes “Ghosts Dressed in Weeds”, the band’s first-ever vocal feature, with underground icon CESCHI RAMOS. His spoken-word performance, spiraling through prose, scream, and sorrow, disorients and mesmerizes—like walking through someone else’s memories with no clear exit. It’s a bold risk that pays off, making this track one of the record’s standouts.

On “Body of the Bog”, we get the closest thing to a mission statement: longform, exploratory, instrumentally complex, and emotionally weighty. TUMBLEWEED DEALER isn’t content with atmosphere alone—they want storytelling. And not just storytelling, but emotional misdirection. Each track contains left turns, bait-and-switches, and musical trapdoors that reward multiple listens. These aren’t jams. They’re vignettes.

The production, handled by Jean-Baptiste Joubaud and mastered by Harris Newman, is immaculate. Every layer—from the warbled vintage synths to the dusty trumpet solos—is given space to breathe. Even the quietest moments feel dense with unspoken emotion, like secrets half-buried in moss.

There’s no denying that ‘DARK GREEN’ is a demanding listen. Its narrative ambition and instrumental sprawl ask a lot from the audience. But that’s the point. TUMBLEWEED DEALER isn’t chasing playlist placements—they’re building worlds. And with ‘DARK GREEN’, they’ve built a world you can lose yourself in… or get lost for good.