If you know something about the guys behind Deadlight Dance, you will find subliminal messages and suggestive symbolism throughout Glass Walls. If you aren’t that familiar with their ethics and outlook then you still end up with a cracking audio-visual experience, although it might not be too hard to get a general sense of where they are coming from via this cool video. It’s a win-win situation.
Deadlight Dance make no bones about their influences; general post-punkery abounds, gothy grooves and darkwave dance beats deftly merge, old-school analogue drives across a digitally-infused soundscape…it’s not quite the Batcave in ’85, it’s not quite the modern post-punk revival movement, but it certainly has a foot planted in either. The sound of the past bubbling up through contemporary sonic waters.
Beguiling arabesque treats lead us in, and then bam! Low-slung basses and growling guitars come crashing in, synth riffs dance deftly above, the beats are skittering and relentless and Nick growls out the lyrics, industrial and gravelly and intense. Taking something from John Carpenter’s They Live, and weaving through no small environmental message, this is the sound of positive goth…affirmative post-punk action… conscious darkwave…meaningful and mature alt-rock moving with the times. I don’t know…something like that. (Feel free to have fun making your own genres up kids!)
As the band heads towards the next EP, Glass Walls keeps the momentum going, a way of signing off on their previous cracking album Vox Populi, and opening up the way for whatever comes next, a way of giving them what they want before the next release arrives, not that this was ever a band whose work could ever be regarded as tardy.
Nu-goth for a new, more enlightened age? Yes, let’s go with that.
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