Department M - Deep Control Album Review
There's been an at times heated debate about the point at which a song ceases to be the writer's property and becomes instead the shared possession of those who hear it (As opposed to the few or many who pay to actually own it). It's become more fractured in recent times as we begin the journey to renting all digital art, but remains as perennial as the one questioning the boundary used to define what is pop, or how experiential it's allowed to be before it's no longer a vessel for fantasy and consumption and transforms into therapy for the writer.
Department M frontman Owen Brinley may hold some of the answers. His former band Grammatics were too esoteric for that purpose: critically loved, they imploded shortly after the release of their eponymous début album, as much victims of their own restraint as anything else. After forming his new venture with fellow Leeds-based producer James Kenosha, Brinley then began to suffer from potentially career ending bouts of Tinnitus and a doppelgänger condition, hyperacusis: in his brutally honest assessment of their psychological impact on his life he's since described mixing panicked fatalism with addiction, desperate measures sought to forget and forgive the spectre of dark potential.
Neither of these qualities are perceived as ingredients for making great pop. But on Department M's second album Brinley has used the feelings as ciphers, perhaps on the basis that music as raw as some of his self criticism would be little fun for anyone, let alone himself as a performer. Also roping in a fellow Loiner in Pulled Apart By Horses drummer Tommy Davison, the tenor of Deep Control is one of a slightly more fluid approach than before, the intent as the songwriter describes "To make a deeply personal and soulful pop-record...of warm analogue synths, future-pop production and experimental textures."
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