Dark Star: News From Nowhere

Dark Star’s 2010 debut, The North, was a claustrophobic journey through the dark side of dubstep – a record whose spiritual heart was somewhere between Bladerunner and early William Gibson. The London trio’s second album is in much the same vein, bursts of melody countered by a dystopian oppressiveness that might sound like cliché if it wasn’t so atmospherically rendered. There have been some attempts to lump the group with Wild Beasts, to paint them as representing a new wave of UK avant-garde. Really, though, News From Nowhere deals in a very old fashioned stripe of UK sci-fi gloom. If you enjoy murky Dr. Who reruns, the novels of Brian Aldiss and sad disco music, it will make you feel very happy indeed