dark dark dark: wild go

Minneapolis-based Dark Dark Dark are primarily the singing and songwriting duo Nona Marie Invie and Marshall La Count, with up to and sometimes beyond five additional members. Wild Go is their second album, and follows on from their reputation-cementing Bright Bright Bright EP released earlier this year. Loosely described as “chamber folk”, Dark Dark Dark’s music contains traces of New Orleans jazz, Eastern European klezmer, minimalism and even pop. And just as the songs lay bare Invie and La Count’s most intimate details, so too does the album sleeve, their tattooed bodies photographed naked; vulnerable yet visibly defiant, Dark Dark Dark have nothing to hide.

The album opens with two thematically-linked tracks. The first, ‘In Your Dreams’, blends accordion, piano, cello, finger clicks and a choir with Invie’s lead vocal to handsome effect, while ‘Daydreaming’ – a response to Elephant Micah’s ‘Wild Goose Chase’, itself a response to Hazel Dickens’ ‘Ramblin’ Woman’ – is the first of several tracks to reclaim the waltz for modern music. It builds in intensity, taking a melancholic turn with a sincere delicacy repeated on most of Invie’s contributions to the record. “Oh the unspeakable things,” she sings, inviting the listener in to find out what they might be.

La Count takes over the lead on ‘Heavy Heart’, a multi-layered Eastern European-flavoured song. Sad yet danceable, it’s pitched somewhere between Arcade Fire-style drama, Regina Spektor’s classical flourishes and the archness of Beirut. The accordion-driven ‘Celebrate’ is, once again, all about details as crumbling bricks and a “hand-sewn quilt” illustrate a hesitant love story as brass and cello build the song into a thing of beautiful understatement. Another highlight is the captivating and stately waltz of ‘Something For Myself’, where Invie’s vocals form the centrepiece of a song that conjures thoughts of ships with dark wooden interiors afloat on choppy seas.

The contrastingly chugging ‘Right Path’, with La Count on lead vocals, is more simplistic and as a result less successful. A summary of some undefined spiritual quest backed with insistent drums and crooned backing vocals, it never quite achieves the impact of the record’s best moments. The closing trio of ‘Robert’, ‘Say The Word’ and ‘Wild Go’ is, by contrast, close to perfection, particularly ‘Robert’, in which the sparse piano, delicate yearning and percussion like jangling change creates a frosty, atmospheric setting for Invie’s warm-edged vocal. It’s a perfect example of what makes Wild Go a record out of time, the lack of electric guitars and expansive use of piano setting the album apart from fashion without being nostalgic, and blazing a humble trail for its talented creators.

[UK release TBC]

Written by: Lucy Brouwer

Tags: dark dark dark, wild go

This entry was posted on Monday, December 6th, 2010 at 1:19 pm and is filed under albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.