"Twenty
Twenty Sound"
EMI Records
CD, 497 2012,
12" 180 gm Vinyl LP, 497 2011
inc. special packaging
Consider the history, and screeching, "Jesus was my age when he got nailed" is wholly understandable. After all, Dark Star were three-quarters of Levitation, with Terry Bickers the fourth. They went through insanity, drug addiction and an acrimonious break-up. Their debut album suggests they never quite recovered.
Messy and howling, a lot of it sounds like it was improvised in the studio, trying to outdo each other with distortion, effects boxes and bursts of fading static. And if that sounds a little self-indulgent, it very occasionally is.
Because in their quest to do more than just make normal guitar music, they're prone to all-out wibble. Then again, it's often breathtaking. Dub gets mangled into an explosion of FX-saturated hysterics. Lyrics are oblique, but 'Ninety Six Days' and 'Graceadelica' are still so serenely creepy they scratch your spine, while 'Vertigo' sounds like worlds collapsing while a DJ scratches on, oblivious.
A fine excursion into the murkier reaches of obsession crawling from the wreckage, then. It's not always pretty and seldom comprehensible, but you have to admire a band who can yell lyrics like "I am centrifugal" as if they were the meaning of life. Although what it all means is anyone's guess. And they said Bickers was the mad one.
7/10
Jim Alexander