REVIEW : DARKSTAR - NORTH

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Genre : Electronic Pop/Ambient/Experimental/Space Music/Post-Dubstep

Year : 2010

Label : Hyperdub

Elusive, enigmatic and dark are terms that best describe the body bending and cerebral catalogue of Hyperdub records. Elusive because the members, who work like alchemists, are always trying to convert the mundane into something priceless (an electronic elixir if you may) and have never constrained themselves under the set parameters of what people call dubstep. While the record label did nurture the dubstep sound, it never held its hand too tight – it gave itself enough freedom to play around its periphery and inculcate new sounds. Whether it’s the tragedy of Burial’s skittery sword-fight in ‘Shutta’, The Bug’s abrasive toasting perfectly accompanying the foreboding cavernous hand slaps in the industrial dancehall of ‘Skeng’, the suitable arranged marriage of West Coast funk with dubstep in Joker’s ‘Digidesign’, the nightmarish spaced out dub of King Midas Sound in ‘Ting Dub’, the Portishead dub of Black Chow’s Purple Smoke or this year’s churning tribal percussion of Detroit resident Kyle Hall’s ‘Kaychunk’, the anthemic dancefloor hollers of LV and Okmalumkoolkat’s Kwaito House burner ‘Boomslang’, Hyperdub that completed its 5 successful years last year, has become evidently successful in doing one thing – relentlessly reinventing their sound to keep up with the times but in a very competitive way – by keeping one foot in the present and the other in the future. No wonder when you revisit its catalogue it sounds as poignant as it did when you heard it the last time and the best part is that when you revisit them one can’t help but notice that they have encompassed all possible sounds; the best example being the LA scene; everyone talks about the LA scene now that it has amplified; they got Samiyam to release his material way back in 2008 because the thought process would have been that his sound is an appendage of theirs. So, when it was decided that Darkstar would release an electronic pop record ‘North’ it never came as a surprise because it was certain that it would be a cut above/away from the rest.

‘North’ is a gem that is a statement in understatement. Distancing itself from the formulaic sugar coated giddy pop of most artists and closer in aesthetic to the purveyors of gloom – Radiohead, Darkstar do not intend to make a grand statement here, but a demure one which is equally affecting minus the excesses. Filled with lingering pads that pseudo-swell – never aiming to overwhelm you immediately but giving you time to settle in and the stuttering digitally treated plaintive vocals that share  heart-wrenching emotions of heartbreak and longing, ‘North’ is a record for the modern age (set in the post-modern age) where distance leaves incapacitating voids and love is painful to say the least. In fact the palpable distance is huge as far as the sound goes. The tracks feel like radio-telescopic transmissions from another planet where James is stuck and can’t come back to the earth – back in the arms of his lover; the intermittent delay affected, hazy and syllable skipped vocals, the galactic shimmer of the arpeggios and the aggrandizing sounds create a visual of a space traveller stuck both in time and place, trying to reach out through his malfunctioning radio transmission device. This feeling of isolation and alienation strikes with softness and the most in ‘Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer’ where the melancholia is infused in the clipped and mangled humanoid vocals and the bare bodied 2-step marimba percussion anchoring the floating sci-fi 8-bit keyboards in the empty space. These inhabitable empty spaces appear a lot in the tracks and speak a lot for themselves – it’s like the soul of James is being stripped of the last remaining happiness and hope – inch by inch. The beatless ‘Two Chords’, one of the highlights of the album, features just a touching Daniel Lopatin-esque roiling and weighty arpeggio and Buttery’s vocals blazoning out “Watch Me Burn” repeatedly in a never ending hollow blackhole of paranoia where the surging chorus and the synth drones are deeply engulfed. Likewise too, the scattered elements - the inward gazing guitar riffs, the hiss melded vocals, the pops/clicks of the percussion and the chords in the shoegazey track ‘Deadness’ are the only ones that are punctuating the near silence that abounds it – a beautiful mix of BJ Nilsen-esque ambient music and pop. The only track where Darkstar flare up is in the title track which is a showdown between the vocals and the ballistic harsh snare patterns.  

Adorning with their flavour of robotic futurism and avoiding any trickery to invoke 80s nostalgia, Darkstar also cover The Human League’s ‘You Remind Me Of Gold’ on this album, titled just ‘Gold’ here. The vocals still sombre and the track fully ingrained in dub, the shuffling sounds, the phosphorescent glow of the piano line, the gentle breeze of moony pads create an otherworldly soundtrack of devotional love that is channelled in the lyrics that vie for your attention – “Baby when I think about you/And that’s when I think about Gold/You remind me of gold”. The band repeats the moving performance in ‘Dear Heartbeat’ where the punctured vocals find solace in the deeply ringing piano notes and in ‘When It’s Gone’ where Buttery tenderly squalls “I won’t forget you” right in the end of the departing track of this satisfying album.

It is a known fact that moving from EPs/12s to a full length is a tough task. It is easier to create sets of tracks and package them in EPs/12s but, making a LP involves a cohesive and a strong theme to be really successful. On this gorgeous debut Darkstar prove that they have a vision and also the creativity to execute it. ‘North’ is another great album worth owning from the increasingly expansive and genre defying Hyperdub stable.

Rating : 8.7/10

http://www.last.fm/music/Darkstar

http://boomkat.com/vinyl/336665-darkstar-north

http://www.myspace.com/hyperdub

http://www.discogs.com/label/Hyperdub

http://www.last.fm/label/Hyperdub