You wait ages then a couple of them come along at the same time. This is my second new album from We Be Echo - who had remained pretty much silent for at least a couple of decades there - in a month. However, where Beat of the Drum excavates old material, Darkness is Home is the legitimate new new album recorded using different equipment and on a different continental landmass with a lot of water having passed under the bridge since Ceza Evi. I have to admit, I wasn't too sure what I thought about the prospect of new material from We Be Echo. There were a couple of later works on the Decades compilation, and they were decent but that was still a while back. Kevin Thorne shared a few things he'd been doing on the internet - seemingly from an album called Mood Swings which I gather either failed to achieve escape velocity or else turned into this - and they sounded all right, but they didn't sound like We Be Echo to me; or maybe I couldn't square the improved quality with those gritty but nevertheless startling tape experiments of yesteryear.
I wonder if that was just something to do with my expectations, or if it really was enough of a thing to have bothered Kevin himself, because whatever the case, Darkness is Home sounds very different to Ceza Evi and yet somehow it's immediately recognisable as a continuation of the same current. A lot has changed, notably Kevin is now vocalising rather than using cut-up tapes, and while he's hardly David Coverdale his voice works really well - a little muted and fairly low in the mix, but doing just enough to give the tracks some sense of personality. The technology is additionally an improvement on the Sharp music centre or whatever it was - proper studio quality with live sounding drums and bass pounding out driving rhythms of a kind which very much invoke Ceza Evi, but also Neu and Hawkwind - which is an aspect I've only just noticed. Oddly, more than anything, Darkness is Home makes me think of Nine Inch Nails if Trent Reznor had grown up listening to Wire rather than Kiss, particularly in some of the guitar work and the general aesthetic with all sorts of mysterious half-heard noises and scrapes shifting and settling in the digital background; and despite any of the above namechecks, it doesn't really sound like anyone else. Darkness is Home may even be the best album I've heard this year.
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