Take that critic's mainstay, The Beach Boys, run them through the Darkstar machine, and you've got 'A Day's Pay For A Day's Work': it's like Dennis Wilson's 'Only With You' discovered on one of William Basinski's disintegrating tapes. It's the kind of record, riddled with familiar tropes but delivered in an often startling fashion, that begs for journalistic similes. The thing is, in the wasteland of truly innovative but deeply engaging music, Darkstar's News From Nowhere really shines. That happens sometimes, you see, if sadly not often enough. It's not really as big as a planet or from another world. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.“ (They were.) It was that music like this seems to have come from somewhere else altogether, somewhere utopian – as the title, stolen from William Morris, underlines – where, as David Mitchell's Ursula (in Cloud Atlas) says, “Our lives are not our own. (They never stood a chance.) It wasn't that they were incapable of capturing the specific alchemy of the song live.
It wasn't that they failed to represent some kind of previously unknown, unstoppable force. Watching the band perform on video in London's Asylum was like being thrown back to earth in leaden boots. Their name was so evocative that the revelation they were a three piece from London brought about a deep sense of anti-climax. There were none more otherworldly than they, and the idea that they might be made up of recognisable individuals seemed unthinkable. I imagined them, preposterously, as some vast, misshapen mass gliding through a galaxy, a trail of silent fire in its wake, the metallic ore in its crust catching the light of distant suns. For me, Darkstar came out of nowhere, their name so suggestive as to colour my perception of them right from the start. The hipper amongst you will already be aware of Darkstar for their 2009 single, ''Aidy's Girl Is A Computer' and its accompanying album, North, the following year. It's the same disorientating, unnerving, rejuvenating beauty that permeates Darkstar's second album, and I can't imagine life without it. And it's the feeling I recognised that day I went diving for the first time and, deep beneath murky water, lost my bearings and panicked, not knowing which way was up and which was down, before I spotted the glimmer of sunshine above.
It's the feeling I experienced the day I rode a rollercoaster nine times with the first real hangover of my life, when the adrenalin pumping through me kept the pain of the previous night's neat Southern Comfort, drunk from a plastic tooth mug, at arm's length for a short but gratifying while before I returned to the toilets to be sick again. This is a highly atmospheric collection which spans everything from abstract electronics to rolling two-step.It's the feeling I loved as a child when I staggered across the grass, screaming and giddy with joy, after my father had given me a 'helicopter ride', taking my hands and swinging me in the air around him. Finally, Horsepower Productions deliver arguably the most club focussed joint here, bolting a classy two-step shuffle onto the gentle melodies of ‘Jam’.ĭarkstar call in the cavalry on this new EP of remixes, one which spawns from their LP Civic Jams. Offerings from Loraine James and Parris are both far out in the leftfield - James’ stuttering flip sounds like early productions for Hessle Audio while Parris’ entry is spectral and impressionistic. Talabot’s ‘Euphoric’ flip of ‘Wolf’ is a whirlwind of percussion and uptempo techno beats, but his ‘Materia Dub’ is markedly different, slower and trippier in a manner which channels Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement and the late Andrew Weatherall. It is testament to both the malleability and rich melody of Darkstar’s originals that such a stylistically adventurous yet aesthetically unified collection could emerge from their source material.įor instance, the two Talabot entries which bookend Civic Jams Remixes are markedly different from one another while still maintaining the dusky glow which hung over Darkstar’s album. Two of the highlights from Darkstar’s Civic Jams full-length album for Warp reworked - ‘Wolf’ spawns a Loraine James remix and a pair of versions from John Talabot while Horsepower Productions and Parris take on ‘Jam’.
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