Darkspace, Dark Space -II, France, Season of Mist, SOM776 CD digisleeve / vinyl LP (2024)
With the departure of bassist Zorgh back in 2019, and her replacement by Yhs in 2022, the mighty Swiss trio Darkspace have chosen to go right back to their early demo “Darkspace – I” and strike a new path from there with their fifth studio album “Darkspace – II”. Accordingly, “Darkspace – II” has the feel of a new adventure, starting with soft airy white-noise ambience and a whispery monologue over which droning guitar and synthesiser ready themselves for lift-off and ascent into a different part of the cosmos. The riffs begin their long chugging warm-up and distant pounding synth drums start their countdown to the moment when the Darkspace juggernaut finally leaves Earth. A second series of percussive beats increases the anticipation and the tension within the music as long droning guitar chords waver and, for several moments, hold back the music from proceeding further to take-off.
When the music does push back and continues its long build-up, deep gravelly voices, more sensed than heard, start carving out sinister forms within the shimmering silver guitar dronescapes and the clashing, thumping percussion. An ambient break where sonic flotsam and jetsam float aimlessly, and the spoken monologue continues in the background appears around the 19th minute and allows us some relief from the intense, almost maniacally obsessive music. The journey then resumes and carries on with its stretch towards the farthest reaches of space.
The black metal element has been dialled right back to a point where the guitars spend nearly all their time revving up or idling while lead guitar solos shriek overhead and layers of droning synth create and maintain a vast sprawling orchestral backdrop. At times, most of the activity and direction are determined by the two parallel series of percussion while the guitars are on extended riff loops. The vocals are usually very subdued and muffled under dense chugging layers of guitar riffs and hard brittle percussion beats.
Although the gradual escalation and elaboration of this particular chapter in the Darkspace saga are impressive technically, and the music can be very spellbinding in parts, compared to previous Darkspace work “Darkspace – II” has very little excitement and exhilaration, and it comes across as a drearily repetitive, monotonous and even exhausted recording. The spark and liveliness of earlier recordings are nowhere to be found. The shifts in pace and rhythm, the variety in the riffing, buoyed by the blast-beat drumming, and the feverish, frenzied screaming that were typical of earlier Darkspace albums are absent.
Of course, I’m aware that Darkspace (by necessity perhaps) may be in a process of reinvention by stripping down the elements that made their music distinctive originally and are reconstructing and recasting their style into something else – but I fear that the trio may have hit a deep void in their new travels and might be stuck in a creative black hole.