Dolomite Minor have brought you some riffs. Pile them high on your plate, because they’re just going to keep on coming.
Joe Grimshaw and Max Palmier are a noisy two-piece from Southampton, who play souped-up blues rock that’s heavy on the fuzz. Having grown up a few doors down from one another the duo soon bonded over a love of blues and ‘60s tunes, eventually cooking up a groove-laden noise of their own.
Their setup will draw lazy comparisons with the White Stripes, but in reality Dolomite Minor’s sound is more precise and forthright than Jack and Meg White’s appealing racket, with Grimshaw’s satisfyingly heavy guitar sound influenced as much by Robert Johnson as Josh Homme.
While their stripped down sound does present certain challenges, Grimshaw has found that his status as the band’s sole guitarist has allowed extra space to inject his own style.
“We like to build songs around riffs, I’ll put an octave on to thicken it up,” he said. “We’re mainly into blues players and then newer, darker stuff like Josh Homme. I really like Rory Gallagher and another big influence is Davey Graham, he’s a folk legend and does a lot of western and Arabic stuff as well. We draw a bit of influence from that.”
Underpinning the band’s appeal is their status as a hard-touring outfit. Scuzzy blues songs do sound all the better with a few hundred road-weary miles under the belt after all. They’re currently on a run of dates with Lyger that will take them into December, and have recently shared stages with Drenge, Deap Valley, British Sea Power and Ash.
“We originally played in hundreds of pubs, all over the place,” Grimshaw said. “We were faced with the typical people in there who were really hard to please. We had to learn the tricks of the trade quite well. That gave us a lot of experience.
“We’re quite strong in terms of our live performances, that’s what we like doing. We like to do something different each time and mix it up. We’re prominently a live band. We love going into the studio as well, but for us the live thing is our main focus.”
Their burgeoning reputation earned them slots at some of the biggest festivals on the UK circuit during the course of the summer, with sets at Reading and Leeds and T In The Park continuing their initiation as a live act and providing a few new challenges in the process.
“It was quite alarming, quite nerve-racking,” Grimshaw said. “We did T In The Park, Reading and Leeds and others like Boardmasters. They were all really good. It’s a different way of playing. There’s no soundcheck, nothing like that.
“We felt really good. Every show is making us tighter. We’ve played gig after gig for a good amount of months, a lot more regularly than we ever did before, and we can really notice it. We know the songs better than we ever have.”
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