North is a synth-pop album, and not synth-pop like general concept but synth-pop like historical formality. It's faithful to OMD, Kraftwerk, and a lot of other technocratic future-music made mostly in England and Western Europe during the 1970s and 80s. Here, Darkstar's beauty is the cold kind. They walk the empty streets in military rhythms and luxuriate in solitude. They cover the Human League.
This development will surprise anyone who followed the singles Darkstar released between 2007 and 2009, when they were another dubstep production group trying hard to develop a signature sound in the context of a genre that changes every month. By last October's "Aidy's Girl's a Computer" (included here), they'd arrived at something refined, melancholy, and lighter than most of the other singles on Hyperdub, a label responsible for some of dubstep's most rigorous and forward-thinking downers (Burial, King Midas Sound, Kode9, etc.). "Aidy's" has a simple backdrop: A skipping drum loop borrowed from British two-step, a synthesized glockenspiel or xylophone repeating a subtle, shifting pattern, and some minimal, surface-level synth-bass. The innovation was in the song's narrators: A series of buzzing synth lines that flicker in and out like their connection to the rest of the song doesn't quite work, and a heavily processed vocal that cuts itself off halfway into each word it tries to say. The track's conceptual elegance was that it invoked the same kind of existential anxieties synth-pop was basically built to-- like how to exist as a human being in a computer world-- in ways that sounded contemporary and eerie, which is part of what makes North a little disappointing: In a way, Darkstar were already on their way to making a record that would've made North feel obsolete.
For most of North, James Young and Aiden Whalley, Darkstar's principals, worked with a more traditionally human-sounding vocalist, James Buttery. There's a little vocal surgery, a little rearranging, but Buttery would never pass for a computer, and that's obviously by design-- in this setting, he's the stunted soul just trying to salvage a little humanity in the post-industrial darkness. His environment-- tapestries of two-dimensional synthesizers humming in minor keys, drum machines chirping and clicking away in mid tempos-- is more familiar than "Aidy's". It's beautiful, too, and barely budges.
Obviously there's no fault in returning to synth-pop templates or ideas in the 00s-- the Junior Boys have done it well, and the Knife have done it even better. But the problem with this music is that the longer it's left out to blend into the general culture, the harder bands have to work to keep it sounding inventive. I've been this kind of sad before, so when I hear it now-- on an album like North-- it's almost as nostalgia for a certain familiar feeling than the feeling itself.
North is definitely Hyperdub's most pop-friendly release, but it's also one of its most conservative-- not a bad thing, just an interesting one given the importance label integrity plays in the electronic dance music world. And while North doesn't compromise that integrity, it's the first time that a label so concerned with the future ended up with a record so committed to the past.
