Review Summary: words R just ｎｏｉｓｅ
The Bandcamp page for
Darklife features lyrics.
Lyrics! The sight of ‘em marked the first moment my hopes faltered a bit. See, one of the most special features of death’s dynamic shroud, to me at least, has always been their incredible gift for focusing their chopped/screwed/slowed/reverbed/ggggll!+çh€d soundscapes around collaged, impressionist vocal performances. Starting with their landmark 2015 release
I’ll Try Living Like This, their best hooks have almost all burbled forth in a delirious simlish of pure moods and grooves, nonsense syllables that you gauge the meaning of on a primal level. It’s by no means a strictly unique gift, but it’s a damn useful one nonetheless, useful for highlighting vapor music’s ability to render the mundane uncanny and for framing its fondness for foreign graphemes in the least fetishistic light possible, even more useful for building a recognizably distinct approach in a genre that was just starting to need one. In contrast with the low-effort member berries flooding the scene at the time, DDS seemed to take refuge in meticulous abstraction and recoil from the baldly recognizable; the clearest phrases inevitably carried a tinge of dread (“living in the street like
dogs… begging for
change”), while the most garbled gibberish skewed infectious and hedonistic (just me typing out
Chum chuumchum chu-CHUGGAAA is going to get “혼자 남은 지금 꼴이 [Reprise]” stuck in a fair few heads).
In the years since ITLLT, as DDS has continued exploring their own idiosyncrasies, their approach has certainly broadened, eventually encompassing the discomfiting dialogue loops of
CLASSROOM SEXXTAPE and the bold exercises in audio parallax of
Heavy Black Heart, but even as recently as
Faith in Persona, that eagerness to decouple vocalization from true communication seemed to be the fulcrum around which all three members' often-disparate sensibilities revolved, the method to whatever sample-pulverizing madness had most recently caught their fancy. With
Darklife, that fulcrum has been relegated to a supporting role to let that eclecticism run amuck, and the results rapidly spin out into pure chaos, a hyperactive sprawl as rich in exciting possibilities and triumphant peaks as it is badly lacking in focus.
It should be stressed that death’s dynamic shroud have not
abandoned their signature sonic philosophy. Far from it, in fact: many of
Darklife’s greatest successes show the trio returning to old wells with a more refined touch than ever. Even after a generous helping of listens in advance of release, lead single “Judgment Bolt” still strikes like some kind of bolt made out of judgment— colorful judgment! EXCITING judgment!
Funky judgment! Hell, its freefall from adrenalized bangersville into dreamlike atmospherics arguably sounds even better… coming right after opener “Stay” casts into doubt DDS’s ability to pull off that exact trick. Even then, though, one wonders if that flattering lighting is really worth sitting through real life nightcore and two entire minutes of interminable ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃｓ-by-numbers. Elsewhere, “Rare Angel” offers by far the album’s most fluid and assured progression overall, ascending in joyful bounds toward the pure pop nirvana of “Tell Me Your Secret” and “Life Should Be Easy”. Sure is a shame that the extended coda “Perfect Angel” swerves those good vibes straight into a stuttering, choppy hellworld that assaults the eardrums for over half its runtime and only culminates in a particularly shrill sample! Anyone else sensing a pattern?
Worst of all— and this one’s a doozy— The Tech Honors vocal feature of other single “Neon Memories” proves less a sweet, humanizing grace note to the otherworldly vocalizations surrounding it (a la “MY WIFE, WHO I STILL LOVE”) and more a harbinger of Honors' ambitions as a Ben Gibbard-style indietronica mild-boy. He takes center stage on six-ish of the fifteen tracks here and likely shows up on more (can’t say for sure, the production here really is insanely layered). Less than half, more than a third. That role of central, comprehensible voice across a full hour of music is not only the most radical shift in approach for the band in some time, but a role that has a lot riding on it pretty intrinsically, and dear listener, if you do not enjoy sluggish dream-pop lullabies that rely entirely on draaaaawiiiiing oooouuuut eeeeveeeery syyyyyylaaaaaableeeeee to make thinly-sketched (and heavily-emphasized) lyrics sound as emotional as possible while assorted electronic effects flicker in the background, then tracks like “Missing Person” and “Where Does It Come From?” quickly prove an Achilles heel that the album never stops struggling to overcome. These misfires hurt all the more for how they distract from the moments
Darklife gets things so thrillingly right: “Messe de E-102”’s hauntingly sorrowful minor-key melody, “Fade Persona”’s delightful “Wrecking Ball” chop, and even the straight up progressive electronic float of “I Just Wanted to Know Love”, by far the album’s most crystalline moment of respite.
There’s a version of this album on a cutting room floor somewhere, I suspect, that’s much more aligned with the DDS I’ve grown to know and love— the group is sure as hell prolific enough to have a handful of odds and ends that sound like something or other here just by accident. When
Darklife fails, it’s never from a lack of enthusiasm on the band’s part. If anything, it’s too enthused, taking a victory lap when it should be lining up its next home-run or playing by new rules without bothering to lay the groundwork for ‘em first. If they want to go all-in on the Tech Honors Well-Produced Slow Synthpop Show, I honestly can’t say anything but good on ‘em; they've certainly put in the work to deserve some returns on the underground legacy they've built over the past 8 or so years. If it turns out to be just another pit stop on their journey across seemingly the entire spectrum of electronic music, then even better! I can't wait to see where their myriad muses lead them next. As to where
Darklife will settle in the scope of their oeuvre, well, it's the exact mix of slick, energetic elaborations on established strengths and inconsistent stabs at new songwriting styles that will at least earn its fair share of fans and likely even a smattering of new converts. Even so, I remain skeptical that this album has the courage of convictions needed to stand alone as any kind of definitive career signpost, too scatterbrained to make a wholehearted case for itself one way or the other.
