In the UK, they’ve gotten dance music down to an exact science. Just listen to an artist like Duke Dumont or Disclosure: From the methodical arrangements to the meticulous sound design, every element is perfectly deployed to ensure maximum dancefloor impact and maximum earworm potential. The decade’s reigning blend of pop melodies and ’90s house tropes is lush, polished, and it sounds expensive—which is ironic for a decade in which the music industry has cratered and actual nightclubs are increasingly gentrified out of business. Still, fantasy is a hell of a drug.
Dusky haven’t had the chart success of Disclosure or Dumont, but they represent a similar impulse. Alfie Granger-Howell and Nick Harriman got their start in the late ’00s as Solarity, recording bright, melodic progressive house for the trance trio Above & Beyond’s Anjunadeep label. As they moved toward a darker, deeper sound, they adopted a new alias at the opposite end of the spectrum: Dusky. Their career until now has constituted a search for the perfect fusion of underground affect, big-room punch, and just enough heart-on-sleeve emotion to make their productions sound weightier than the club tracks that bookend them. It’s safe to say they perfected that mix on tracks like “Yoohoo” and “Love Taking Over,” both marked by the duo’s characteristic balance of hard and soft: While drums and bassline thump you sternly in the chest, echo-soaked loops of vocals swirl like victory pennants over a smoldering battlefield, at once triumphant and sad. So here, on their second album, the question becomes: Where now? To answer that, they follow the same course as a million dance long-players before: a sentimentalist hodge-podge designed to prove that their mettle extends beyond the dancefloor.
You may have already figured out how this story goes. Soaring, percussion-free intro and ambient interludes; wavering falsetto vocals; slow, sensitive closing song—all the tropes of the grown-up electronic album are here. So are the requisite guest appearances, beginning with an awkward Wiley cameo, “Sort It Out Sharon.” It’s an obvious nod to the broad sweep of British rave history—the intro is a nearly note-for-note rewrite of 808 State’s “Pacific State”—and perhaps there’s something novel about putting a grime MC over a Balearic house beat. But Wiley feels hemmed in by all those steady kick drums, and the rest of the track, with bass like a Foley artist’s thunder sheet, can’t escape the shadow of influences like Joy Orbison and Boddika. The Gary Numan feature “Swansea,” on the other hand, is too reverent: A slow, chugging, gothy number with Numan in peak warble, it offers no compelling reason to listen to it instead of virtually any song from Numan’s own back catalog.
The album isn't without its moments: The genuinely thrilling “Trough” finds a new sweet spot somewhere in between James Holden’s synth flare, M83’s widescreen drama, and the needle-nosed tone clusters of the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds. You can hear Granger-Howell’s formal training in composition paying off here, where they stuff every available crevice with harmonies until the spectrum sparkles like diamond pavé. And their finesse comes to the fore in other places as well: the synthesizers in the lumbering “Songs of Phase” flicker like colored flames, and “Tiers” masterfully layers its interlocking synths.
The real problem is that their moments of pathos don't often feel earned. The album opens on such a dramatic peak—part ambient come-up, part breast-beating cry into the void—that it leaves little room to progress from there. The close-harmonized vocals of “Tiers” (“Like tears falling,” unless that's supposed to be “Like tiers falling,” which wouldn't make any sense at all—but why title it “Tiers,” then?) are cloying and sticky-sweet, and the same goes for “Long Wait,” whose DNA can be traced back to songs like Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” and Moderat’s “Bad Kingdom”: the surging strings and Solomon Grey’s pinched wail are simply syrupy. “Marble,” topped with Granger-Howell’s own surprisingly capable falsetto, is actually pretty effective for a downtempo Bon Iver knockoff; freed from the need to move bodies on the dancefloor, it can settle into its melancholy and wallow for a pleasant while.
The dancefloor cuts, on the other hand, are torn between competing impulses. After “Yoohoo,” the soaring piano-driven uplift of “Ingrid is a Hybrid” feels pat. “Runny Nose” opens with what I hope is a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of coked-up nightlife philosophizing and shifts into a peak-time techno take on Banco de Gaia’s vague exoticism. And “Songs of Phase,” the toughest, most effective club track on the album, sells itself short by falling back on snippets of an instantly recognizable Ursula Rucker a cappella, sourced from a 1994 King Britt production, that’s been reused in many, many songs over the years. (Budding producers can even get it for themselves on Beatport.) “As I journey deeper inside myself,” she gravely intones, but nothing on the album suggests much in the way of inner quests; Outer, fittingly enough, projects its energies relentlessly outward, broadcasting its emotional content in a way that too often feels heavy-handed. It’s as though Dusky didn't quite trust their listeners to meet them on their own terms. With every laser sweep and strobe burst, you can imagine them anxiously scanning the audience's faces, looking for evidence of rapture and pushing their faders further into the red.
