The Donner Party

Tracks: Before Too Long; Halo; Are You In Tune With Yourself; Godlike Porpoise Head Of Blue-Eyed Mary; When You Die Your Eyes Pop Out; The Ghost; The Owl of Minerva; Oh Esmerelda; John Wilkes Booth; That That Is, Is; Jeez Louise; Spiders; Surfin To The Moon; Clean Living; G-l-o-r-i-a; Big Black Bird - Demo; Halo - Demo; The Ghost - Demo; Are You In Tune With Yourself? - Demo; Why Both - Demo; Oh Esmerelda - Demo; John Wilkes Booth - Demo; Surfin To The Moon - Demo

Label: Donner Party

The Donner Party has always felt like a band suspended between the sweet and the grotesque — nursery-rhyme melodies laced with a very adult sense of unease. Their self-titled album, The Donner Party, doesn’t just lean into that tension; it thrives there. It’s wry, unsettling, oddly warm, and unmistakably theirs.

While many indie bands of the late '80s embraced lo-fi as a shield, The Donner Party employs it as a cutting tool. These songs aren’t rough sketches — they’re intentional, skeletal frameworks that let the emotional splinters show through. The production is bare, but the storytelling is vivid and strangely intimate, like someone reciting diary entries they probably shouldn’t be sharing but can’t keep in anymore.

Across the record, there’s a persistent brightness that feels slightly… off. Tracks like John Wilkes Booth and When You Die Your Eyes Pop Out are delivered with such breezy, sing-song charm that their morbid subject matter becomes something almost tender—a twisted lullaby for misfits.

Vocally, there’s a matter-of-fact plain spokenness that heightens the emotional sting. No grand flourishes, no dramatics — just a voice that sounds like it’s recounting events exactly as they happened, whether they should be spoken aloud or not. It provides the record a documentary feel, but one filtered through dark humour and a soft kind of fatalism.

The emotional core of the album lies in its quietest moments — the ones where the band stops winking and just lets the sadness sit. These flashes aren’t sentimental, but they are deeply human. The Donner Party’s greatest trick is how they make bleakness feel gentle. Not comforting, exactly — but familiar. Real. Something already inside you, recognised rather than discovered.

If this album has a thesis, it’s that life’s strangeness, tragedy, and comedy are inextricably tangled. And instead of trying to separate them, the Donner Party simply hold them all at once. The result is an album that feels small in scale but expansive in meaning — a fragile world built out of sharp edges and soft melodies.

In short, The Donner Party doesn’t demand your attention — it quietly earns it. It’s a record that lingers long after it ends, somewhere between a smirk and a sigh. It suggests that the band weren’t just odd—they were astute. And in their peculiar, understated way, they may have been telling the truest version of the story all along.