The Dengie Hundred With Gemma Blackshaw - Days In Pieces

The Dengie Hundred's collaboration with Gemma Blackshaw, together on record for the second time with Days In Pieces, seems to be increasingly ushering itself closer to the light, offering here a new found sense of melody and performance not especially prevalent on previous outings. All things being relative of course - Days In Pieces continues to display the hallmark aesthetics of sunken electronics, liminal spaces and tape spool hauntings that characterised the Lammas Land LP and Tube cassette, while also pushing the project into wider frames of reference. Coil, particularly in their Time Machines and ELpH guises, remain a guiding influence, though now their are also traces of European minimal wave and post-industrial angst, and even the sensual blue light atmospherics of trip hop and, by association, perhaps even a group like Bark Psychosis. A good part of this can be attributed to Blackshaw's growing confidence as a vocalist, her Delphic vocals a combination of poetic rumination and dreamy glossolalia. The lyrics aren't always easy to discern, though when they are clear appear to fixate on feelings of longing and loss, dependency and desire, made all the more impactful as Blackshaw drifts into wordless, ecstatic purring. The Dengie Hundred are a far from extrovert proposition, though there is something distinctly more open and inviting at play here, no longer seemingly positioned in the depths of night but instead the velvet glow of the dawn, as if a weight released, a moment shared and a truth understood. A very intimate record charged with private, experimental impulses and confessions that somehow feels like their most accessible work to date - all things considered, quite the achievement. 

The Dengie Hundred play with Guests & Cliche Toupee at SJQ on 28th May. Tickets available here