Ever since Edinburgh's Marc Dall dropped the name Young Hunting and began working under the Dalhous alias, his recorded output has taken a more unassuming turn. Though his crepuscular inclinations still manifest itself in some of the music he makes under this new moniker, the aggression, hostility, and clanging signifiers of industrial music that populated that earlier work have largely vanished, supplanted with hushed keyboard swells and lazily clattering percussion. Over the course of one EP and two full-lengths, Dall and longtime collaborator Alex Ander have focused their efforts on capturing ominousness rather than agitation; on their new album Will To Be Well, they offer placidity in the wake of that disquietude.
Dall has said that this new LP continues to explore his ongoing fascination with the work anti-psychiatry figurehead R.D. Laing. But rather than impose the academic sterility of such arcane ideas upon the record, he leans on the that philosophy's association with the new age movement, cribbing the delicate, technicolor ooze that artists like Laraaji have explored since the genre's 1970s heyday.
"Lovers of the Highlands", in particular, pairs that movement's swooning hum with the familiar horror score trappings of albums past. But the darkness that Dall and Ander previously mined isn't as present on Will To Be Well. The distant string swells that open and underpin "Four Daughters by Four Women" wouldn't seem so out of place on an Air France record; the track eventually dissolves into a series of anxious chattering vocal samples, but this time around elation breaks through Dalhous' established facade of blackness. By letting light in, the textural play featured on the buoyant synth organ workout "Someone Secure" and the rippling, florid "Function Curve" stand out against the record's gloomier moments.
Stripped of their obfuscation, and with a hefty helping of optimism, Dall and Ander's compositions resemble the muted sentimentalities of his fellow Scots in Boards of Canada. Dalhous' sound remains more nervous and jittery than the work of Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, but Will To Be Well uses its woozy, watery synth pads and vacant, skittering percussion as devotional rather than de-motivational tools. Where past efforts buried its intimacy under coldness and severity, Will To Be Well offers a warm, familiar embrace.
