Dark – Christopher Dallman (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

This first single from Christopher Dallman‘s forthcoming album tells us much about what to expect from Origin Story. It is pretty telling that he is, first and foremost, an acoustic guitar-wielding singer-songwriter turned electronic music maker. For Dark is a song that, whilst being built of digital, dreamlike delicacy and beguiling sonic washes, is wonderfully robust and melodic, for all its glitchiness and space, and could easily be rendered back into more traditional forms.

I mention this because of the old adage that any song able to hold its own when played on a battered old acoustic is a song in the true sense, and Dark is both a song that echoes the traditional format and pursues a new, electronic pop form. And that is quite a feat to pull off, yet pull it off Dallman does.

So, this is pop made with an eye on the future, but with the experience of the sound of the past, not a complete leap into the unknown sonically speaking, but one that takes us far enough away from the solid shoreline of what has gone before that it certainly feels like a creative leap of faith.

And it is a leap that pays off because, while most of the pop pack’s competition is happier to merely replicate what has gone before, with Dark, Dallman is creating a whole new sound. It is a hazy and washed out, spacious and atmospheric sound but so too gently infectious and full of groove, but it is a groove set in motion through playing by its own rules.

We hear a lot about people moving the sound of pop forward, artists doing new things, and writing new musical chapters. We might hear it a lot, but those artists seem to deliver very little in terms of real advancement. Christopher Dallman is the exception, Dark is a real step forward, and Origin Story can’t drop quickly enough.