Daniel Woolhouse lived a double life in the run-up to recording his debut full-length as Deptford Goth. By day, the south Londoner was a teaching assistant in an elementary school; by night, he recorded synthesizer-plumped ballads in his front room. You hope for the kids’ sake that there wasn’t much correspondence between the two; story time round Daniel’s is a gloomy hour, full of mumbled doubts and unsettling lullabies. Unlike the playfulness and joy of creation inherent in, say, former kindergarten teacher Bat for Lashes’ debut, there’s little obvious link between Woolhouse’s personal and private worlds on Life After Defo, a disconnect that persists throughout the album.
Establishing these barriers is clearly some kind of protective reflex for Woolhouse: For his part, he says that he knows he’s not very expressive in conversation, and that making music “is kind of a way of transmitting those feelings without having to look someone in the eye.” But Defo plies its trade in indistinct “feelings”: The title is meant to allude to a state post-certainty (“Deffo” is a British abbreviation for “definitely” mostly used by posh students), which is backed up by a frustrating emptiness in many of the lyrics, most of which aren’t audible. “There must never be/ There will never be/ There will never be…” Woolhouse repeats during the chorus of “Bloody Lip”, without ever specifying what terrible thing must never again come to pass. “Something’s coming and I can’t see what it is,” he mumbles on the whirring glow of “Union”, reminding us that one man's profound uncertainty is another's half-assed, unfinished thought.
Defo sounds very beautiful, though there’s little to positively distinguish it from similar records by Active Child, How to Dress Well (XL Recordings house engineer Rodaidh McDonald worked on Total Loss and Defo), and Rhye. Woolhouse became known through a Mariah Carey tribute jam, but says that “at the heart of every song there is a little old blues singer with a guitar.” He’s buried deep if so, beneath a monastic, reverential cloud that couches glimmering organs, stuttering firecracker percussion, beatific harp sounds, and an occasional ominous sheen that sounds skimmed from a softer Mount Eerie record. There's been a significant reduction in tempo and action since 2011's Youth II EP. If that folk singer is there at all, it’s in the forlorn, digitized Bon Iver-style vocal swoops that haunt a number of the songs. Everything here is very well executed, tasteful, and gravely intimate, but when “Bronze Age” clanks and moans into motion like a weepy James Blake leading a chain gang, some heart monitor bleeps vainly searching to blur the “real and synthetic” effect Woolhouse explores here, it’s not hard to crave something sexier, more melodically robust, and stirring.
To give Defo its dues, Woolhouse has a knack for earwormy melodies, and when he pushes against his comfort zone, he can end up somewhere compelling. “Years” starts as a forlorn, vocal-led lull, but swarms into a dark, wheezing flurry of processed cries, deep horns, and loose, splashing cymbals that bear a certain similarity to post-rock done Tortoise-style. Given that Woolhouse almost exclusively mumbles throughout the record, the lyrical clarity of the chorus to “Object Objects” becomes quite affecting by comparison: “If you’re telling me there’s no such thing as heartache,” he sings, the incredulous high note of “telling me” debunking the notion better than a conclusion probably could in this situation, as the skeleton of some house tune chirrups around him.
Like the xx’s debut album, Life After Defo will gain in vitality as it becomes the personal soundtrack to moments of horizontal intimacy and loneliness. But where xx was incredibly direct and specific, and all the more human for that, Defo doesn’t give a great deal in the first place, its ethereal chilliness leeching off the human emotions that will undoubtedly be fed to it. Taken as a whole, it’s a pretty, enveloping record that executes its modern influences with panache, though the intangible, purely aesthetic nature of Woolhouse’s vaguely downhearted emotional state makes it hard to appreciate Defo as anything other than luxurious ambient icing.
