- You know when tracks come up labeled as "alternative" in iTunes or whatever other player you use and you pause to wonder what such a designation, rightly or wrongly assigned, might even stand to mean at this point? Darkness Falls, a duo from Copenhagen, is "alternative," for better and worse—the better being an evident lineage with some good old material from the margins of post-punk and beyond, the worse being a sort of generic adherence to what sometimes sounds more like a study than a passion project. "Hey!" has a sound that gets at some of the old garage-rock twang of bands like the Cramps and some of the playful new-wave wiggle of the B-52's. It's a little slight but more than serviceable, and it gets better as the beat builds into a carnivalesque disco-rock outro that signals the presence of Trentemoller, who produced all four Darkness Falls tracks here.
The three other songs are more spare and, at least ostensibly, more haunting. "Noise on the Line" gets by mostly on acoustic guitar and tambourine. "Paradise Trilogy II" mixes some arid twang with strings and galloping percussion into a nod to Ennio Morricone. And "Strangers Coming" goes gauzy enough to call to mind old Cowboy Junkies. Each of the tracks is at least fine, but the range covered by them all suggests an act that hasn't quite figured out what it wants to do yet. Trentemoller, for his part, grows less evident as the material grows more diffuse. And the voice of Josephine Philip has a habit of wandering around in search of a style, almost like the footage you sometimes see of the fascinatingly rudderless old pan-"alternative" band fronted by Stefani Germanotta before she became Lady Gaga.
Tracklist A1 Noise On The Line
A2 Hey!
B1 Strangers Coming
B2 Paradise Trilogy II