Darkroom is a three-piece band from England consisting of Michael Bearpark, Andrew Ostler and Andrew Booker. “Some Of These Numbers Mean Something” is their eighth album and marks the 10th anniversary of the project. Intriguingly described by the label as ‘ambient stadium rock’, musically they combine electronic ambience with floating space rock guitar to produce gentle and sometimes cinematic instrumental music. The addition of crisp drums, deep bass guitar and sweeping synth textures brings a sense of immediacy to proceedings. Darkroom have a slightly unusual mix of traditional instrumentation – especially guitars and drums – with gentle electronics which fuses the extravagance of 70’s prog rock guitar workouts with the modern aspects of electronic music production. Opening promisingly with the ghostly screeches, insistent beat and atmospheric space rock guitar textures of “The Valley Of Ten Thousand Smokers”, “My Sunsets Are All One-Sided” is another highlight, starting with bright yet gentle sparkling ambience and building over almost seven minutes to become a dubby and somewhat abstract collision of improvised drumming and meandering guitar sounds. “No Candy No Can Do” is decidedly tropical while “Chalk Is Organised Dust” is gently acoustic and introspective. The album also occasionally resembles the stadium guitar heroics of U2 (cf. “Insecure Digital”) or the signature guitar sound of The Cure (the title track) and sometimes uses Spanish guitar with sparse electronics. Utilizing quite a range of guitar styles this album covers acoustic, prog rock, space rock and drone augmented by drums and electronics to give it added presence.

Full review here.

Tags: SOTNMS