Demdike Stare - Wonderland

Demdike Stare
Wonderland
2016
Google Play

December and the first week of January are usually a wasteland for new music. You'll find yourself really scrapping the bottom of barrel of something new to listen to, yet every now and again you may find something really neat. That was the case with Demdike Stare the production duo from Manchester, England. The half techno half experimental group craft a record that a times feels like it could be a dance album, but then shifts into some really dark, brooding territory. As a whole each track is really long, but there seems to be more than one song in each track, as the music shifts and squirms yet still managed to keep some kind of throughline, however muddled that may be. "Hardnoise" begins with a whole lot of silence followed by some aggressive noise. The song takes about two and a half minutes before it finally kicks in and when it does you are so bored that caring is far beyond your capacity. If you do hang around there are some interesting experimental things going on but whether or not they are actually going to move the needle is the real question. Deep brooding experimental is nothing new and Demdike Stare certainly are much better when they blend in the techo.

What I am talking about is actually evident at the end of "Hardnoise", they drop the moodiness and allow this really pretty techno line to dominate. It sounds absolutely fantastic especially after what you just went through with the first eight minutes of the song. But not even their dance tracks are all stellar. "FullEdge" has a great downbeat but is so thing on instrumentation that it never fully comes together. The song also sticks out on the album sounding quite different from everything else in a bad way. Listening to the album as a whole you can sense where some of these ideas began, and where maybe they were supposed to go, but perhaps the final cohesion did not come together. It is almost absurd to tell a DJ to get to the point, but that has never been more evident than on this album. They meander so much and spend so much time on one piece of music that they never really hit their end goal hard and by the time they reach it, who cares? Even a track like "Sourcer" that seems to hit a bit harder than the rest just lingers and linger and lingers. There are some really interesting things going on with this album, and more than just a little potential for greatness. However it is not there just yet, and once Demdike's sound is fully refined, we may really have something on our hands.

7.2 out of 10