The point is that there's plenty on News From Nowhere that you might feel you recognise, and yet it's all delivered within a new framework, pieced together meticulously in bizarre, bewildering but ultimately invigorating patterns. Stick Animal Collective in a bouncy castle with a case of Mike Tyson's Black Energy drink and you could find yourself listening to something very similar to 'Amplified Ease'.
Pack OMD off to the Caribbean with a Vocoder in their suitcase and you might just end up with the choral melancholy of 'Timeaway'. Take that critic's mainstay, The Beach Boys, run them through the Darkstar machine, and you've got 'A Day's Pay For A Day's Work': it's like Dennis Wilson's 'Only With You' discovered on one of William Basinski's disintegrating tapes. It's the kind of record, riddled with familiar tropes but delivered in an often startling fashion, that begs for journalistic similes. The thing is, in the wasteland of truly innovative but deeply engaging music, Darkstar's News From Nowhere really shines. That happens sometimes, you see, if sadly not often enough. It's not really as big as a planet or from another world.
We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.“ (They were.) It was that music like this seems to have come from somewhere else altogether, somewhere utopian – as the title, stolen from William Morris, underlines – where, as David Mitchell's Ursula (in Cloud Atlas) says, “Our lives are not our own. (They never stood a chance.) It wasn't that they were incapable of capturing the specific alchemy of the song live. It wasn't that they failed to represent some kind of previously unknown, unstoppable force. Watching the band perform on video in London's Asylum was like being thrown back to earth in leaden boots. Their name was so evocative that the revelation they were a three piece from London brought about a deep sense of anti-climax. There were none more otherworldly than they, and the idea that they might be made up of recognisable individuals seemed unthinkable. I imagined them, preposterously, as some vast, misshapen mass gliding through a galaxy, a trail of silent fire in its wake, the metallic ore in its crust catching the light of distant suns. For me, Darkstar came out of nowhere, their name so suggestive as to colour my perception of them right from the start. The hipper amongst you will already be aware of Darkstar for their 2009 single, ''Aidy's Girl Is A Computer' and its accompanying album, North, the following year. It's the same disorientating, unnerving, rejuvenating beauty that permeates Darkstar's second album, and I can't imagine life without it. And it's the feeling I recognised that day I went diving for the first time and, deep beneath murky water, lost my bearings and panicked, not knowing which way was up and which was down, before I spotted the glimmer of sunshine above. It's the feeling I experienced the day I rode a rollercoaster nine times with the first real hangover of my life, when the adrenalin pumping through me kept the pain of the previous night's neat Southern Comfort, drunk from a plastic tooth mug, at arm's length for a short but gratifying while before I returned to the toilets to be sick again. It's the feeling I loved as a child when I staggered across the grass, screaming and giddy with joy, after my father had given me a 'helicopter ride', taking my hands and swinging me in the air around him.
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