- Mumdance and James Kelly mine the middle ground between shoegaze and black metal.
- Jack Adams, AKA Mumdance, has pursued new musical frontiers for most of his career. Once known as a grime producer, his mixes have come to incorporate experimental and noise music, and his trio The Sprawl showed a deep-seated love for making a gnarly racket. Bliss Signal, the self-titled LP from his duo with WIFE frontman (and ex-Altar Of Plagues member) James Kelly, evaporates black metal, shoegaze, post-rock, noise and ambient into a cloud of textured atmosphere. It's in turns tranquil and overwhelming, the sound of two artists combining their skill sets to come up with something unique.
Shoegaze and black metal are more connected they might seem—there's even a subgenre called blackgaze, pioneered by Alcest and perfected by bands like Deafheaven and Harakiri For The Sky. You can hear blackgaze in the triumphant swells that Kelly and Adams whip up on tracks like "Surge" and "Floodlight." The wall of sound is noisy but the chord progressions are uplifting, the thwack of the drum machine propulsive.
Though guitars are the loudest and most central element on Bliss Signal, they rarely sound like guitars. On the title track, the serrated chords sublimate into fog, snare rolls sounding off in the distance. There are metal riffs in "Floodlight," but they don't last long. Only on "Tranq" do the duo truly harness the power of black metal, with mechanistic blast-beats building up to a claustrophobic commotion.
At 30 minutes, Bliss Signal is a brief album, but any longer and the impact of its meteor-strike flashes would be dulled. In fact, it probably could have been even shorter (the unremarkable "Endless Rush" slows down the second half of the LP). Before the release of this self-titled album, the duo released a three-track EP called Drift that worked better, especially "4 AM Drift," a track that exemplifies the furious energy of blackgaze. But fans of heavy electronic music, be it from Shapednoise, JK Flesh or Ben Frost, will find a lot to like in Bliss Signal, a contained explosion of an album that keeps its extremes constantly in balance.
Tracklist01. Slow Scan
02. Bliss Signal
03. Surge
04. N16 Drift
05. Floodlight
06. Endless Rush
07. Tranq
08. Ambi Drift