With all things goth, post-punk, and darkwave having a real resurgence of late, Deadlight Dance finds itself perfectly placed to surf the dark prevailing zeitgeist. Not that you could accuse this duo of bandwagoning; making such music is both the start and current edge of the musical story for these two school friends, but the formation of the band itself felt like an act of returning to the sound and creative friendship of their shared formative days. As always, everything in music is cyclical.
Now signed to Ray Records with a burgeoning back catalog, their third album, Vox Populi, sees the band really hitting their stride and also reminding us that the gothic scene, for want of a better word, was always a broad and subdivided place…scenes within scenes within scenes.
So here we find big, anthemic numbers such as opener “Gloss,” a blend of raw and spiraling guitars and relentless basses running over a driving digital beat, but also tracks like “Red Flag” which remind us that the darkwave sound and the otherworldly dancefloor of the Blitz Kids were never that far apart, it’s just that the New Romantics that the scene spawned gravitated towards the light of commercialism while their gothic siblings favoured the shadows of cultism.
“Fortune Cookies” is a blend of precision sonics running through spacious atmospherics, allowing the vocals to be framed and thrust front and center and revealling a wonderful alt-pop vibe, “Glass Walls” blends the arabesque and the industrial, dance and delierium and “When You Were Mine” echos how the project started with these two multi-instrumentalists weilding acoustic folk weapons of choice to create a sort of gothic-roots sound. Anyone remember The Handsome Family?
What I love about Deadlight Dance, one of the many things, is that for every recognizable groove found in the post-punk corner of your, and I suspect their, old vinyl collection, there are two more that are the sound of that scene moving with the times. And that is how we keep making bright (well, dark) new futures for music.
