Darker My Love: 2

By: Dennis Cook

The ’60s pop art cover shot, the big bold “Pop” in white letters on a solid black back cover and the Pepperland interior illustration all point the way to Darker My Love‘s sincere psychedelia. Their sophomore full-length sits nicely on a continuum that starts with the Nuggets compilations meanders through The Stooges and other trip prone ’70s thugs, winds past Galaxie 500 and Rain Parade, and tumbles by The Verve en route to their own future-past brand of psych, a remarkably tuneful variant on the fuzzy, star dusted dreaminess of their ancestors. As the ridiculously hooky “Two Ways Out” and “Pale Sun” show, Darker My Love aren’t pure spaceway ramblers, as interested in well sculpted songs as they are in hyperdrive tangents (though “Add One To The Other One” into the Sgt. Pepper-y “Even In Your Lightest Day” is a pretty bloody swell acid sojourn). Actually, little here feels extraneous; each warble, tube amp-testing solo and kick drum pump where it needs to be. Sure, this is sunnier than earlier releases but in shedding some black obfuscation Darker My Love have revealed a more confident, more interesting band, one that helps rehabilitate the doughy nothingness of the word “psychedelic,” restoring some charge to the former power word.

JamBase | Spaceways
Go See Live Music!