Daffo, 'Where the Earth Bends' Album Review

Daffo Expels and Escapes on Where the Earth Bends

Growing up, Gabi Gamberg’s yard was lined with buttery-yellow daffodils. Even now, as the seasons shift and the bounty of springtime subsides, Gamberg’s daffodils are unremitting, living in infamy in the form of their stage name, Daffo. It’s no wonder Gamberg chose a name that signals their youth’s germination—their career charts the trajectory of an artist from their impetus, one willing to parse through the knots of adolescence and search for coherence. The Daffo presented on 2023’s Pest EP had a penchant for killing spiders, but at twenty-one, they look now with more compassion toward the unwanted pests of their earlier music. With indie-rock hits like “Good God” and “Poor Madeline,” Daffo put down roots that flowered into their debut album, Where the Earth Bends—music hot with the spark of juvenalia, reflecting an urge to glorify escapism and expel jumbled up rage until it just makes sense.

Immediately, Daffo’s world is rampant with little vulnerabilities that rise from the soil. “Get a Life” opens on a flower that’s been stepped on, the beginning of a foot trail of squandered opportunities. Gamberg stresses this loss of life, singing, “When you find yourself looking back on all the paths you’ve been, there will be no flower there.” As evidenced by layers of distortion and rousing percussion on many of their tracks, Daffo’s music has an edge, a thorny exterior that sometimes deflects attention from the sincerity of their lyrics. “Get a Life” could easily be the typical mandate imbued with snark, but it beckons its recipient with goodwill, as preceded with, “If you look where you’re going you might get a life full with every bite.” But Daffo hasn’t totally sworn off teenage angst as a songwriting vehicle: the darker ”Habit” takes a snider tone, assigning its target a laundry list of weaknesses to improve upon. Stemming from the deep, distorted guitar that fizzes under Gamberg’s voice, the song wields a pulsing temper—a petulant side of their sound that’s been waiting to show its claws.

Most Popular

“Quick Fix” is the product of retreating to old vices post-writer’s block. Long nights of cigarette smoking and days begun in unfamiliar bedrooms led Gamberg to write “I’m a whore for a quick fix,” a blunt display of self-deprecation. But sonically, the track takes the opposite approach to “Habit,” electing to strip everything down to a humming guitar, low strings, and vocals instead. While it’s common to hear a Daffo song about revenge or the like, their songwriting prowess shines best in their willingness to double down on their own flaws, like in the prickly “When I’m in Hell,” where they abandon moral purity in favor of slumming it with the outcasts. There’s a freedom when Gamberg sings, “I’ve got all these jokes I’ve been dying to tell,” knowing that their quips can be expelled without fear of retribution.

Self-control is a looming aspiration on Where the Earth Bends, and the challenge of seeing this goal to completion is often charged with Daffo’s playful self-effacement, like in “Carrot Fingers,” which explores discomfort, uneasiness, and physicality. There’s an age-old adage that our teeth are strong enough to bite through fingers but our brains won’t let it happen. “Carrot Fingers” portrays a mind that tempts its body to challenge this belief, one that invades with thoughts like, “[I] could bite my finger off like a carrot.” In the making of the album, Gamberg underwent a period of fighting OCD; “Carrot Fingers” reckons with compulsion, as they sing, “My body is no temple.” It’s one thing to fight your impulsive thoughts, Daffo argues, but it’s another thing entirely to fight with something that can hit you back.

To escape the human body, Daffo gets creative. In “Bad Dog,” Gamberg paints themselves as the titular canine, singing, “Tongue out, I lap up the puddle that you wept.” They relay the humiliation ritual of trailing a person that won’t do the same for you, submitting to commands yet getting abandoned. Daffo reclaims their humanity later in “Go Fetch,” which outsources the dog metaphor to the subject of the song, wrapping its refrain around “here, boy” and “drop it.” This pair of songs charts the all-too-common oscillation between power dynamics in relationships, the kind that leaves its victims chained up on fences, baring their teeth—or “hungry and neglectful,” as Daffo writes in “Absence Makes the Heart Grow.” Here lies one of their killer rock songs, complete with a pounding tempo and crackling guitar tone. Its refrain is primed to sound off in tinny earbuds and sweat-laden concert pits; the song materializes ugly thoughts that float to the surface, thoughts like “I’m so desperate it’s disgusting.”

Sometimes, Daffo’s songs ache with sincerity without any artifice to fall back on. “Unveiling” is set at a funeral, where Gamberg is offered a metric for how much they’ve changed, as pointed out by distant family members saying things like, “Look how much you grew.” It seems antithetical to call attention to growth at an occasion that embodies eternal stasis, but the cyclical nature of family ties are ever-present in “Unveiling.” To embody these quieter pulls of grief, Daffo dulls their usual edge, opting to stick to their acoustic guitar and voice instead, which coaxes through the terse lyrics with an elegiac force. But through it all, the “trees comb the clouds into dividends,” and “after a while, you are not a child anymore,” as Gamberg sings in the title track. As they look to the future, whispers of past quietudes arrive: their dad pulling a Jersey slide, a rusty highway sign, a cousin with a name they can’t quite place.

Everything that lives in Where the Earth Bends has the privilege of perspective, whether that entails rehashing childhood grievances or bracing the inevitable with a film of wisdom. The album’s cover art presents this season of the Daffo identity, where two barren trees arch their thin branches out into a blue sky. When the sharpness of change thrusts auburn leaves astray in piles, what remains is the fortitude of roots. The daffodils in the lawn will grow and die and grow again, coursing through the seasons and checking the rearview.

Daffo Expels and Escapes on Where the Earth Bends

The Philadelphia musician’s debut album is rampant with little vulnerabilities, thorny distortion, playful self-effacement, and killer rock songs.