When electronic music composer Nicolás Jaar and jazz multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington unleashed their collaborative project Darkside onto the world in 2013, they changed the game. It was the sort of musical meeting of minds that felt entirely serendipitous and to this effect, a bit precious. The fuzzy psych rock of 2013’s Psychic was entirely exhilarating for the then landscape of the genre and arguably drew the blueprint for psychedelic rock’s next phase and the likes of Kevin Parker. It’s easy to forgive their near eight year hiatus then, especially taking into consideration how each of Darkside’s respective parts have burgeoned by way of their solo endeavours during this time. Jaar would go on to embrace his increasingly trippy experimental side and release a lauded collection of albums, and Harrington would further immerse himself in the avant-garde guitar jazz of The Dave Harrington Group. Yet by taking the time to clearly formulate their respective solo vocabularies, Jaar and Harrington have by proxy developed the language of Darkside with an even stronger sense of direction than before. For a band who already arrived with a definitive identity and point of view, this rejuvenation produces intriguing interpretations of Darkside’s psych rock template. In finding the space where their own creative and conceptual preoccupations meet, Spiral, the duo’s second album as Darkside released through Matador Recordings, is both quintessential to Jaar and Harrington but also entirely distinct.
Stream and Download Spiral here
The album opens with the one-two punch of Narrow Road and The Limit, tracks which ultimately establish the mode of Spiral’s abstract tonality. The latter of the two lays out Spiral’s intent with a sudden U-turn towards double time drum syncopation. This passage of percussion recalls later Radiohead, which Spiral most closely resembles in sound. What Yorke aimed for on The King of Limbs, Jaar and Harrington seem to find more effortlessly. This may be due in part to the way Spiral intermeshes its organic and synthetic components. The concept is still psych rock, but the methodology is less straightforward and more happenstance. There is an improvisational edge to the music on Spiral which alludes towards two producers at play. The earthy sounds of Harrington’s drums, guitars and piano chords as on Inside Is Out There are in constant conversation with Jaar’s saccharine electronic hat tricks. Those shimmering chimes and glassy synth stutters we have come to associate with Jaar’s sonic palette embellish most of Spiral, particularly in its opening moments on Narrow Road.
As suggested by its title, Spiral tends toward non-linear structures. In the hands of lesser experimentalists this could easily go off the rails, but Darkside hold their music together with a logical sense of follow through and nuanced technical instincts. This particular play date does have the potential to unravel into conceptual chaos and at times gets close. This is perhaps most true of Spiral’s first half. For example, the convoluted doctor-as-government-agent narrative of Lawmaker straddles a muddy space between socio-political wokeness and hallucinatory DMT diatribes. But Jaar and Harrington mostly manage to avoid succumbing to loftiness. Aesthetically, its textures and motifs melt and slide into one another as if to mimic the effect of tripping. In fact, the music on Spiral is designed in a way that recalls the experience of getting high. The way that Jaar and Harrington contort and manipulate sound is largely to thank for this. On I’m the Echo, an unmistakably Harrington guitar aria contorts into an alien sitar outro as Jaar’s woebegone vocals dissipate into the ether. On The Question is to See It All, Harrington’s isolated plucked strings are distorted into wonky and warbling stabs that interpolate the bendiest of Jaar’s synth modulations.
Jaar’s most striking contribution across Spiral is his voice. It is a lithe, sometimes ghostly presence whose melodic tendrils warp around the abstract landscapes it inhabits, guiding us through the trip. On the title track, it blooms and wilts through washes of filter and distortion against the sparse backdrop of a plucked acoustic guitar. As phrases of ectoplasmic synths tumble beneath these strings, Spiral the track foregrounds what is for Darkside a more intensive exploration of melody and the human voice. This is also the case with closing track Only Young, which provides us not only with a gorgeous turn for Harrington’s lead instrument (the electric guitar) but the unexpected investiture of Jaar’s voice as his lead instrument.
There is no doubt that Spiral will constantly be considered with regards to Psychic, with that album existing as a sort of spectral forefather that Spiral would be expected to live up to. But attaching the two so definitely dampens the experience of Spiral for what it is; entirely its own beast. If anything, Spiral takes its cue from Psychic’s more ambitious latter half, with tracks like The only shrine I’ve seen and Freak go home being the closest in lineage to what Darkside has created here. The album is a richly textured collection of synchronicities, with Jaar and Harrington reformulating the familiar tropes of psychedelic rock towards their own unique instincts, more often than not to spellbinding effect.
Listen to Narrow Road, the opening track of Spiral, below.
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