With their fourth full length, Dälek leaves the noise and skree of Absence behind them and offer up instead a more contemplative effort. This album demonstrates that you don't need to clobber people over the head with sonic violence to get the point across.
While I've been an unabashed fan of Dälek's work for years, even I found their last outing for Ipecac, Absence, to be something of an acquired taste. It's an impeccably produced onslaught of angry, dense noise that makes its point, but it's not a record that I have returned to a lot because listening to it tends to take a toll on my state of mind.
Dälek had been on a trajectory towards that violent, monolithic sound for some time, and Absence represented the logical conclusion to a path where every track got bigger and louder than the last. Starting with 2006's Ad Noiseam 12", Streets All Amped, Dälek seemed to be easing their way back out of that dense, noisy corner, and now I think they've found a new direction. Abandoned Language winds up saying all of the same things and hitting on all of their favorite themes, but with a subtlety that wasn't possible with everything cranked past 11.
Here, Dälek have gone back to the more straightforward sound of their early work like Negro Necro Nekros, building around old school beats and dead ahead rhymes. The Dälek production style is still evident in layer after layer of discordant drones and samples, but Abandoned Language is full of space, melody, and detail too. Stripping out some of distortion allows Dälek's voice to rise to the surface and turning the volume down from time to time gives the album a dynamic range that Absence lacked.
This might be Dälek's most accessible album to date, but it's no less angry or direct than anything else they've released. On the surface, this might seem like a band that is mellowing but in fact, I'd say just the opposite is true. Abandoned Language works in ways that a bombastic onslaught can't; it's a kin to the difference between fighting with fists and fighting with words and I think that Dälek is proving that the subtle, calculated fight can be more effective than brute force.
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