Blue Dolphin – Robert’s Lafitte LP Post Present Medium

Blue Dolphin was a wild, iridescent punk band from Austin, Texas circa 2016. Over the course of a year, they created a buzzing, liberatory sound, a dark bloodmix of melodic ease and existential gloom. This pairing suggests monuments like ‘Peace?’ or ‘Is This Real?’ but Blue Dolphin found this path all on their own, through trust and reliance, that practice space unity that the best bands build simply through the joy of playing with each other. Emboldened by this connection, the band birthed memorably fractured, brisk music full of daring and revelation. At times, the songs barrel along as if the band is struggling to keep their instruments under control, an unrestrainable, breathless frenzy of notes. Other times, they take on a pensive ache, a weighted despair. Every time they form a perfect skeleton for Sarah Sissy’s vocal shove. The songs will squall and sway, reach overload, rattle half to death, and yet the moment Sissy begins singing they snap into a focused beam, a bulldozing, clear-eyed force.

‘Robert’s Lafitte’ is a rush of darkness, resilience, mystery and bliss, exactly what you’d want from a record named after Texas’s oldest running gay bar, and a band maybe named after the indescribable freedom of ocean life or maybe named after a type of ecstasy. The LP contains the entire recorded output of Blue Dolphin, including all three self-released tapes and four previously unheard songs. ‘Robert’s Lafitte’ is co-released by Post Present Medium and Cleta Patra and is limited to 500 copies. Members of Blue Dolphin have played in other bands like C.C.T.V., Chalk, Mystic Inane, Chronophage and NOSFERATU.