On paper, Doc Daneeka and Benjamin Damage seem like such a perfect match that you'd expect any musical collaboration to mirror their work apart: Damage, with or without erstwhile partner Venom, has specialized in bouncy bass-driven house heavy on UK funky snares, while Doc Daneeka has peddled a slightly more rigorous but no less athletic take on precisely the same sound (check 2010's furrow-browed but undeniably huge remix of Breach's "Fatherless"). So it's surprising how subtle, sedate, and frankly unlike their former selves They!Live turns out to be; the transformation reminds me of raver friends who hooked up on a drug binge and then promptly moved out to the suburbs to grow vegetables together.
There was a honeymoon moment where the partying trajectory carried through the first flush of romance: On their first single together, last year's aptly named "Creeper", Daneeka and Damage hit upon the best of all possible worlds, offering a throbbing bad dream of strobing, bleepy synth organ riffs over remorseless 4x4 kick drums, if not "Show Me Love" then maybe "Show Me Anxiety". In the tune's second half, after a build up that becomes more deliciously interminable with each replay, they unleash a thunderous rave breakbeat rhythm over a woman's outraged declaration, "you're nasty!"-- the massiveness of the revelation made possible only by the drawn-out nature of the slow-reveal. In its simplicity and patience, "Creeper" seemed at odds with both the rave revivalism it superficially referenced (in truth the result was closer to early Underworld) and the typically cluttered post-everything maximalism of current UK dance music (not to mention Damage and Daneeka's own pasts).
They!Live stretches the already strained relationship further, offering nine voluptuously melancholy tech-house slowburners, each trying to outdo the other for how tightly wound it can hold itself, how reluctantly it can give up its secrets. In many ways this is a fine thing, not least because even as they embrace grayscale, pseudo-minimal tech-house with gusto, the duo cannot help but infuse the arrangements with its trademark rhythmic restlessness, evidenced less by a riot of percussion than by its careful, strategic deployment within slippery, snaking grooves, like the papery, syncopated snares weaving in and out of the distracted, sleepy female vocals of "Battleships", or the stop-start tango struggling to emerge out of the bleak techno pound of "Ellipsis Torment", or the tiny, irresistible drum rolls that seem so out-of-place and yet so welcome on the otherwise severe, glacial closer "Bleach & Penicillin".
But it's a problem for They!Live that a foreshortened, less charming "Creeper", if not the album's loudest moment, remains by some distance its most memorable and gregarious, with only the melancholy stutters of "Charlottenburg" and the clipped, synth-driven house of "Juggernaut" coming remotely close. Part of the problem, though only part, is that the duo have swapped a Spartan (albeit decreasingly so) musical landscape for a densely populated one, and then set out about erasing any tell-tale signs that they haven't been living in the neighborhood forever. Maybe they need to hang out with the locals more: Like many UK producers who have travelled to Berlin and become entranced by its techno culture, Damage and Daneeka have absorbed much of the city's musical seriousness and subtlety, and some of its emotional sweep, but too little of its frenzy or perverse sense of humor. It'd be much easier to love, as opposed to merely like, They!Live's glistening, long-form tech-house soundscapes if there were more bombs and curveballs hidden amongst its lovingly pruned forest glades.
