Darkness Before the Dawn – D D Colvin (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Having watched Roger Waters blow the roof off the O2 in London in only the last week, I can’t help but notice more than a few parallels between his music and this new album from D D Colvin. As Another Day winds its understated way from the speaker to your ear, it does so with the same sense of dark chill and sophistication, the same amount of poise and power, the same sort of sung-spoken vocals, the same sense of atmosphere and anticipation.

And as soon as Fast Asleep replaces it, you realise that, like the aforementioned ex-Floydian, this is a concept album, or at least an album of related concepts, painting a picture of individual lives locked in their early hours, nighttime world, ordinary lives under the microscope, the mundane and the everyday examined and heightened, making the subject matter both relatable and also almost mythological.

And so it goes, an opera of music both progressive and cinematic, yet punchy when needed and almost predatorial, prowling the suburbs and tenement blocks, the inner city terraces and the city streets in search of suitable subject matter to examine the dark underbelly of modern society.

Rinse Repeat Return is a heady blend of glitchy sonics and musical washes, the abrasive and the soulful, Vangelisian keyboards smoothing over the cool, clinical and angular. Lamentation is a mix of the orchestrated and operatic, the ambient and the restrained and, finally, the epic and anthemic and things round off with Blood, perhaps one of the more song-like structures, accessible and infectious, yes, but also still deep and meaningful.

An album as wonderfully unexpected as it is brilliantly executed, and having found D D Colvin, I am now headed into his back catalogue for some exploration. I may be some time!