Blue Daisy: Darker Than Blue

Darker Than Blue, the second album from London-based musician Blue Daisy, announces its intentions with its cover. A close up of Blue Daisy, neé Kwesi Darko, fills roughly 70% of the image, and the rest is pitch black. Daisy himself is lit so darkly that he appears to be sort of navy blue, and the music inside matches that dark photograph. But not always in the ways listeners might expect.

Opener “My Heart” marries soft, sparse organ and piano tones to faint, wordless, harmonic chants, both in falsetto and in rich, harmonized baritone. Later in the song, quiet kick drum and finger snaps give the song a small sense of rhythm. “My Heart” feels like a warm, musical blanket, but one put on late at night. There’s no sense of daylight about the song, but at the same time it avoids the anger and sense of doom implied by the album’s title and cover; that all comes later. First, Daisy wants to ease us in, and possibly lull us.

Second song “Daydreaming” follows in the general vibe of “My Heart”, beginning with simple, soulful electric piano notes and a quick but laid-back rap. Once the song gets going, though, it adds an insistent ride cymbal beat and a very active, jazzy bassline. But mid-song, everything stops while what sounds like a pitch-shifted Daisy speaks in a Barry White basso about how “This is hell, this is heaven”. The song never returns to its beginnings, instead drifting away into a long fadeout. The next song, “Home”, is just under two minutes long, but it brings in the sense of doom for the first time. Daisy sings about “Waiting by the phone / Waiting for your call / It’s been a few days now” before repeatedly lamenting “I wish I could bring you back home.” There’s a general sense of melancholy here, but the slow-moving, underlying chords have a weight to them, a general heaviness that implies more than basic sadness.

“Alone” finds Daisy continuing to lament. This time he complains “I’m here alone”, before Connie Constance enters with a soulful guest vocal performance. While she doesn’t seem to be directly replying to Daisy, she seems to be dealing with her own issues, eventually echoing “I’m out here alone” as Daisy comes back to his own refrain. After a brief musical interlude, the album arrives at its title track and centerpiece. “Darker Than Blue” finds Daisy discussing being successful “at the top of Hills, Beverly”, but his performance gets angrier as it goes, while a squalling electric guitar solo and pounding drums get more and more wild underneath him. Eventually he begins to finish every sentence with a compelling, semi-spat “Haaah!”

The back half of the album spirals from this tantrum into progressively blacker territory. And because the record has gradually built to this point instead of starting there, the darkness is absolutely compelling. It helps that the music very effectively conveys this mood shift, trading warm organs and electric pianos for angry electric guitars and drums. “Six Days” could sound ridiculously overblown, but Daisy sells it. The song doesn’t land on its refrain until two-thirds of the way through, but once it does, it becomes a sort of chant that echoes through the rest of the song. “Six days of repentance / The seventh day the reaper spoke / And took him away”. Similarly, “Heroine” could be jokey, being based on the pun, “She was his heroine / She took the pain away.” But the swirling music, anchored by a simple bassline and an equally simple guitar reply, gives the music the feel of a bad drug trip. And Daisy’s descriptions of this woman’s similarity to a drug addiction make sense from his protagonist’s damaged perspective. Once she leaves, he spirals downward into a depression that is equally as damaging as physical withdrawal.

It’s hard to get more intense than “Heroine”, so Blue Daisy opts for quiet accompaniment at first on “We’re all Gonna Die.” The underlying music is mostly electric piano and it takes a while for an actual beat to show up, which gives his rapping an off-kilter, spoken word feel. As he rounds around to the chorus (“My girl saying this smoke is gonna kill me / But I don’t give a fuck / ‘Cause we’re all gonna die”), the intensity again cranks up. But this time it peters out about a minute before the song ends, as if he doesn’t have the energy to keep it up anymore.

It’s at this point that Darker Than Blue starts to drag just a bit. The instrumental “Let’s Fly Tonight” is decent but feels a bit superfluous. “Gravediggers” has a hell of a bassline and a nicely syncopated thumping drum rhythm. But the whisper-chanted vocals make it difficult to make out any words, and the hard rock groove the song builds up to, while strong, doesn’t carry the same emotional weight as most of the album’s earlier tracks. Final track “You and Me” is supposed to be brighter, or at least superficially cathartic, but doesn’t quite get there. The church organ is a good start, but the lyrics leave something to be desired. Maybe that’s intentional, as one doesn’t get the impression that the woman actually returned. The statements of “It’s you and me / Against the world” and “I see your face every night / When I close my eyes” and the final two minutes of the song, which simply repeat “It’s just you and me”, could all be the hallucinations of a man who didn’t ever come out of his depression. But musically, the song is inert and it leaves the listener wanting. Even if the story ends ambiguously, the album doesn’t have to finish on a mediocre musical note.

Despite the somewhat disappointing end, Darker Than Blue is a very effective concept piece and it takes the listener on quite a journey. It’s not the kind of journey you might want to return to again and again, but it is quite the musical statement. The album’s mixing of genres from hip-hop to soul to psychedelia to hard rock feels very appropriate for the agonizing saga the record’s protagonist goes through. Blue Daisy has been known as an electronic musician to this point, but Darker Than Blue feels very organic and that analog feel matches his storytelling very well here.