DAYSDEAF - ALBUM REVIEW

Daysdeaf - When Colour Lost Light 
Daysdeaf - When Colour Lost Light

"The album song titles work as a gradient. Starting from white, the songs are then ordered in the form of the electromagnetic spectrum, then moving to phenomena of light." Call me crazy but that is not a normal statement that you expect to get in a press release from a band, is it? Now, when you're done calling me crazy, call me intrigued because when a band says something different in a press release then there's a fair chance they'll do something different with their music. Daysdeaf are fairly sparse in terms of information but I have deduced that they hail from Toronto and, judging from the opening track, 'White Flags', they are influenced by a range of styles from Hip-Hop and Dubstep to Electro and Soul (I'm going to ignore the annoying chipmunk style vocal effect for now).

As we move through the colours, from 'Silver (Oh Mercury!)' and 'Giving Life To Greys' to 'Purple Thrills' and 'Deep Blue, Deep', it's obvious that Daysdeaf are balancing the beam between kooky electro tunes and wanting to have that big Billboard hit, maybe with someone like Pitbull guesting on rap duties. 'Chasing Green', however, as a Mike Oldfield meets Jean Michel Jarre feel to it before it goes all Linkin Park meets Eminem and then the originality starts to wane. 'Bright Yellow Sun' has an engaging acoustic intro with some jazzy piano and percussion to give you that real south of France feel but again the vocals don't match and that spark is quickly extinguished.

'Tangerine', 'redREd' and the bizarrely titled 'Nazi Pink Triangles' continue the theme of promising ideas never quite being allowed to reach fruition, the latter of the three being somewhere on the lines of Parov Stelar but without the sense of fun. Moving away from the colours and on to the light we have the lullaby chimes of 'Iridescent', the creepily calm tones of 'CMY' and 'Prism' which features one of my least favourite sounds - the clicky, artificial finger snap that dull R'n'B songs always throw in for no good reason. The album finishes with 'Light', a mellow, Lemon Jelly-esque piece of instrumental music. Overall, this is a frustrating album as Daysdeaf obviously have some great ideas and some talent to back it up but the tendency to revert back to angry vocals and over instrumentation sometimes drowns out the spark of originality.

More information: https://www.facebook.com/Daysdeaf


Listen/Download: http://daysdeaf.bandcamp.com/album/when-colour-lost-light 

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