In 2015, as Britain anointed its first Conservative-majority government since 1992, there was a sense among vanquished liberals that things could scarcely get worse. A gimlet view of the national mood came from Darkstar, the London-based, northern English electronic duo. Following the departure of singer James Buttery, their election-year album Foam Island foregrounded spoken-word field recordings that captured working-class northerners as they danced in the pincers of Tory Britain. (“Cuts,” for instance, revolved around a bleak audio clip from a straitened council’s website.) What was once Darkstar’s subtext—soundscapes of barren yearning, conceptual nods to the English North—now had a concrete object: Here’s what’s screwed, and here’s why. It worked, in part because Foam Island handled heavy themes with a lightness of touch: preoccupied, spiritually drained, yet oddly upbeat, like a chipper coworker after a grueling shift.
In hindsight, it’s possible to see how political LPs like Foam Island and Jam City’s Dream a Garden (a companion piece, of sorts) were energized by the prospect of Tory re-election. As reality dawned, the outpourings of leftwing dismay were, if nothing else, inspiriting communal moments in isolated times. That was before Britain waved goodbye to the European Union, of course, and now, it’s all too easy to conceive of things getting worse. Made to Measure was written well before Brexit, but its austere, dystopian murk reflects the extinguished hope that’s characterized recent weeks here: deflated, anxious, uncertain.
While the duo always had the chops for poignant songs—after “Aidy’s Girl Is a Computer,” they scrapped a vaguely commercial debut to burrow into the impenetrable North—their vocally despondent music since hasn’t quite replaced that single’s computer-human discord with a compelling synergy of the two. On “Reformer,” guest vocalist Empress Of is a more natural fit, light-as-air and acrobatic enough to swirl above the smoky, claustrophobic synths. Gaika has less to play with, but complicates “Black Ghost”’s sparse, grime-textured production with a serenely stuttered elegy: “I sing for the black ghosts/I sing for all that we lost.”
There’s a sense of distant, benevolent forces at work on the pair of remaining tracks. “Deltaskelta” revives the digitally haunted “Aidy’s Girl” aesthetic with modem-like twinkles, illegible lyrics, and a sweet melody rendered with the effect of an extraterrestrial transmission. Shimsung’s moonlit edit of “Through the Motions,” a *Foam Island *track, threatens to drift into a starry-eyed slumber, but culminates with sad, strangled synths and warm chords that glide in to catch them.
Darkstar are sometimes lumped in with the “post-dubstep” crew—spatially abstract songs, earnest vocals, the odd 2-step beat—but it’s a tag they never really grew with. Unlike James Blake, who, as Mark Fisher puts it in Ghosts of My Life, has “gone from digitally manipulating his own voice to becoming a singer; from constructing tracks to writing songs,” Darkstar often feels like a construction project: Even the limber, prettier turns on News From Nowhere and *Foam Island *seemed somehow un-songlike, layered-up rather than laid down. While *Made to Measure *is refreshingly quick to the point, it solves one problem and creates another: The eerie tunes are so cryptic and dense, the structures so churning and hopeless, that the vocals are a necessary rescue operation. Across four tracks, the EP hovers gracefully on the cusp of an abyss, staring at despair and willing it to turn into beauty. It does, with help from their friends, but next time—regardless of who joins them—they’ll be stronger if they learn to save themselves.
