<p>- <em>Spiral</em> feels like it’s <strong>Dave Harrington</strong>’s guitars in charge with <strong>Nicholas Jaar</strong>’s production in service, punching it up beyond what any guitar band could sound like without him. Don’t be surprised if you see both their names on production credits of other guitar-driven acts soon, because the flavours being brought to the table here are the most innovative thing about Darkside’s latest outing.</p>
<p><em>Narrow Road</em> drops with organic dubstep vibes reminiscent of <strong>Beats Antique</strong>, along with wrenching angular melodic features straight out of the Sahara Blues/ <strong>Mdou Moctar</strong> playbook: jagged rips of guitar contrasting with liquid lap-steel and bowed string sounds. Atmospherics are cranked to the max, with layered '70's-folk-style vocals washed out til the colour bleeds.</p>
<p>Second cut <em>The Limit</em> comes in ready to show off ALL the dynamic contrast tricks. Distorted bass holds up a mellow groove as several vocal, guitar and ornamental parts pop in and out of existence around it; retriggered voices fading to nothing as twisting feedback samples weave throughout. It’s showy production, slick, complex and effective, even if the tricks aren’t themselves strictly new.</p>
<p>Every instrument is pushed out of its familiar sonic here, everything squeezed, crushed, stretched, distressed, de-rez’d and granulated. Yet the result remains earthy and grounded, almost retro, thanks to jangly junk percussion, that almost <strong>Nico</strong>-esque vocal tone and a constant threading back to acoustic and clean electric guitars, plucked harmonics and swells. However, even when this rootsy palette is embraced there’s still vinyl-spindown samples and twitchy synthetic textures fizzling in the background.</p>
<p>For a group that has some heavyweight dance music pedigree this album has a real Sunday-morning-coming-down feel. It’s the <em>back-to-mine</em> chill-out session, not the party that came before.. a record for the times when you’re too frazzled to dance anymore but your brain is still alert and craving detail.</p>
<p>In a time of <strong>Lil Nas X </strong>we have to ask: is this in a continuum with attempts to rehabilitate or modernize country music...?? It certainly has the spaciousness, the darkly wistful ambience and wry vocal delivery, the centring of clean guitars. It really feels in the lineage of gentler <strong>Animal Collective</strong> or much of the <strong>Stone Roses</strong> in their mellow moments: a bluesy minor tonality dominates throughout, with plenty of cleverly understated synths and studio flourish; like the parts of <strong>Gorillaz</strong> that were aiming for melancholy and modern at the same time.</p>
<p>Jaar and Harrington have talked about their collaboration as being like the fun jam-band that they get to do on the side of their more serious day jobs, but the level of detail here makes that sound like bullshit. <em>Spiral</em> shows that, for these two, there’s still such a rich vein of guitar sounds to be mined, and that the instrument has an emotional immediacy that drum machines and modular synths can’t quite match.</p>
<p>Truly an electronic blues record for the '20s. <em>Spiral</em> will hold up as a masterclass in melding guitars and modern production into a cohesive whole.</p>
<p>- Kieran Ruffles.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2618341044/size=large/bgcol=f…; seamless><a href="https://darkside.bandcamp.com/album/spiral">Spiral by DARKSIDE</a></iframe>