The Night Fell Beside Our Hopes For This Album

When we first heard Follow Me Down, the lead single from UNKLE’s Where Did The Night Fall, we were excited by what seemed like a second coming of mid-90s alterno trip-hop, a golden age reigned over by the likes of Björk, Tricky, and Portishead. It’s a rich collage of tribal music and mid-60s pop with rock rhythms, breakbeat fills here and there, featuring a commanding vocal performance by Rachel Fannan of Sleepy Sun.

Where Did The Night Fall is indeed the second coming of a defining characteristic of the mid-90s, yet unfortunately, it’s one of the least missed: Albums that you buy on the strength of one great song and a cool album cover, only to find it full of duds.

What’s odd though, is that while Follow Me Down seems to be carried by the guest appearance, much of the rest of the album seems, if anything, hurt by them.

Natural Selection has a good groove going for it, and a great breakdown segment that sounds something like those Nine Inch Nails songs most influenced by David Bowie. That passage, in fact, is the best part of the track, as it’s absent of The Black Angels’ Alex Maas’ vocals. It’s not that Maas’ performance is flawed; He’s just a bad fit for the song, which could be so much sexier if the vocals were not so… terrestrial, for lack of a less unflattering term.

A perfect cross between Peter Gabriel and Perry Farrell, Gavin Clark of the folk band Clayhill sings on two tracks; Another solid vocalist who, at least on Falling Stars, just feels out of place. It’s as if the vocal performance from one song was simply velcro-d to another song’s music, with very little chemistry actually bonding the pieces that are worth more separately than summed. The Healing is a more organic composition, however it sort of feels like scraps of other songs with a half-cocked, repetitive chorus.

On the other hand, while nothing is quite as good as Follow Me Down, a few cuts do manage to work at least. Joy Factory featuring Autolux is an effectively layered and well constructed four minute heroin trip shoegazer. Not the kind of music that gets us up in the morning, but undeniably a decent song.

Caged Bird (w/ Katrina Ford) and the unassisted Ablivion provide a nice back-to-back double jab, being two of the more cohesive cuts on the album. Meanwhile, Mark Lanegan steals the show on the closing track Another Night Out, a genuinely beautiful song that would be no less powerful if it was just Lanegan with a guitar sitting on a crate.

The bottom line? The Brits will probably eat this shit up, as the cookie-cutter, assembly line pop over the pond makes Ke$ha look like John Lennon. But around here, chemistry and craftsmanship count for a lot, and a lack in either category is going to throw off our scales. What we ultimately take away from Where Did The Night Fall is a new interest in Sleepy Sun and Clayhill, a renewed interest in The Black Angels and Autolux, and a longing for UNKLE’s long gone heyday with DJ Shadow.

Oh, and one really, really good song.