Darling Black always feels like a bridge between sonic worlds. Between the modern, alternative dance floor and those post-punk, darkwave days. Between a dark thread running through more urban, trip-hop sounds and more mainstream dance-pop…or at least its edgier, alternative, underground moments. Between the black underbelly of disco and more modern art-pop expressions. It is music slightly out of time and place, but music that connects so much.
“Deep Down in the Ground” is also a song that uses its space wisely. Beats are robotic; basslines seem to pulse and wash, ebb and flow. And, apart from a few additional wandering sonics and clever musical motifs that pass through, it is largely atmosphere and anticipation that lie in the space between those beats and that beguiling voice.
And like all good music aimed at the denizens of the dancefloor, it also chooses its words wisely, each line sounding like a slogan, a statement, a sound bite, repetitive, beguiling, and memorable, precision-cut and purposeful.
Minimalist and marvelous, spacious and scintillating, dark and delicious, like all of the music that Lulu Lewis singer Dylan Hundley makes under the Darling Black name, “Deep Down in the Ground” is music from the fringes, music for the outsiders, music made in, and indeed for, liminal spaces. Or, as she puts it so succinctly, “Groove meets the graveyard and the street with a little carefree knowing.” I couldn’t put it better if I tried.
