The Darkness

Last of Our Kind

                          ^{The Darkness — Last of Our Kind} •»   New 2015 album from the UK rock survivors ... their first with fresh drummer Emily Dolan Davies! Includes “Barbarian”.
Formed: 2000 in Norfolk, England
Location: Lowestoft
Album release: June 2, 2015
Record Label: +180 RECORDS / Canary Dwarf Limited
Duration:     50:36
Tracks:
01. Barbarian      3:33
02. Open Fire      4:02
03. Last Of Our Kind      4:10
04. Roaring Waters      4:38
05. Wheels Of The Machine      3:07
06. Mighty Wings      5:47
07. Mudslide      3:26
08. Sarah O’ Sarah      3:53
09. Hammer & Tongs      4:02
10. Conquerors      4:57
11. Messenger (Best Buy Bonus Track)      3:50
12. Always Had The Blues (Best Buy Bonus Tack)      5:11
℗ 2015 Canary Dwarf Limited
Members:
•»   Justin Hawkins,
•»   Dan Hawkins,
•»   Frankie Poullain
•»   Rufus Tiger Taylor
Credits:
•»   Emily Dolan Davies Composer
•»   Simon Emmett Photography
•»   Christian Furr Illustrations
•»   Dan Hawkins Composer, Engineer, Mixing, Producer
•»   The Last of Our Kind Choir Primary Artist
•»   Thom Lessner Illustrations
•»   Mike Marsh Mastering
•»   Ian Norfolk Assistant
•»   Nick Roche Cover Art
•»   Kevin Smith Design
•»   Trevor Weston Monologue
REVIEW
By ANDY MCDONALD | May 29th, 2015
•»   In the grand scheme of things, it's strange that the whole Darkness story even happened on the scale that it did. At the time of their breakthrough in 2003, popular guitar music was firmly planted in another part of the spectrum. We were on the eve of emo's Noughties revival, in which vulnerability and introspection were all the rage, while the charts had the mirthless fuckery of Keane to look forward to. It wasn't particularly fertile soil for big–haired, big–riffed cock rock. Nevertheless, the Lowestoft lads' bold, brash debut Permission To Land struck light a bolt of lightning and thundered its way to the top spot.
•»   Perhaps it was the sense of carefree, over–the–top fun in a more straight–laced music scene, a piece of escapism for a country in the midst of a war on terror, or a nostalgia trip for the old and a history lesson for the young. Whatever the case, the mainstream took to said record like Justin Hawkins to a catsuit. Unapologetically anachronistic with their pyromaniacal, falsetto hijinks, the first incarnation of The Darkness burned brightly but all too briefly. Picking up awards and festival slots like they were going out of fashion, they rode the wave of fame — and the odd flying tiger — to multi–platinum heights. Troubled and costly follow–up One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back kept things ticking over until 2006, when the pressures of fame and the singer's taste for party powder spelled the end. A triumphant return to Donington with stylistic forefathers Def Leppard five years later brought things full circle, and provided a jump–off point for third effort, Hot Cakes. The title was tempting fate a bit.
•»   http://www.drownedinsound.com/
AllMusic Review by James Christopher Monger; Score: ****
•»   Beginning with a spoken word intro (“One by one the kingdoms fall/they looked upon this isle and took it all/harbingers of pain/Edmund the martyr cut down by a Dane on the orders of Ivar the Boneless”) and ending with a torch– and morning star–waving power anthem delivered with throaty gusto by bass player Frankie Poullain, The Darkness’ first post–comeback album and fourth studio outing overall may also be their best to date, effortlessly pairing Spinal Tap–inspired braggadocio with meaty metal riffs and soaring pop hooks, with both a lusty wink and a resolute kick in the teeth.
•»   Having proved themselves, more or less, to still be competent and creative schillers of all things late–70s and early–’80s metal with 2012’s Hot Cakes, the band sound as locked in as they did on their 2003 debut, offering up a surprisingly bold and diverse, relentlessly likeable smorgasbord of hard rock posturing that manages to touch on nearly every iteration of the genre. Built around one of the best riffs to appear out of the ether in ages, opener “Barbarian” sets a mean pace (it’s also a fine perfunctory retelling of the Great Heathen Army’s homicidal siege of the Anglo Saxon kingdoms of England during the 9th century), but the band, much like the sons of Ragnar, seem hell–bent on pillaging every last corner of the keep.
•»   Viking themes loom large, with the Led Zeppelin–esque “Roaring Waters” and the truly epic, ELO–meets–Muse–blasted “Mighty Wings” leading the charge, but detours into groove-laden, Southern boogie rock (“Mudslide”), “She Sells Sanctuary” era Cult–inspired psych–rock, and no–hook–left–behind, earworm–heavy guitar pop (“Hammer and Tong”) prove to be just as compelling. What’s most surprising is that Justin Hawkins’ seismic falsetto, as impressive as ever, no longer feels like the main event, as the band match each caterwaul with a comparable sonic boom of their own. Last of Our Kind is the sound of a band unencumbered; it’s an album that was probably as much fun to make as it is a joy to listen to.
REVIEW
The Darkness, ‘Last of Our Kind’ — Exclusive Track–By–Track Breakdown
By Graham 'Gruhamed' Hartmann | June 2, 2015 2:47 PM
•»   The Darkness have just released their fourth studio album, Last of Our Kind. While fans have already experienced the singles “Barbarian” and “Open Fire” which both dominated our Battle Royale weekly video countdown, the full album was unleashed this week.
•»   To go along with the release of Last of Our Kind, we invited Darkness frontman Justin Hawkins and guitarist Dan Hawkins to our headquarters so the duo could give us an exclusive track–by–track breakdown.
•»   As you may expect, the brothers came from a variety of places when it comes to musical inspiration. But even better, sometimes the stories after the songs’ completion describe a track better than any sort of sonic dissection.
“Barbarian”
DH: My wife was listening to “Barbarian” in the car for the first time, believe it or not, today.
JH: Did she poop her knickers?
DH: She almost crashed her car. Basically, the guy in the beginning is my gardener, Trevor, and he’s got a really thick Norfolk accent and she like, “Oh, that’s Trevor, that sounds funny.” Then the full force of the track came in and she actually curbed the car. It cost me about 300 fucking quid because she scraped the rim and knocked the tracking out.
“Open Fire”
JH: The video for it is part us playing on a beach with a howling gale in Ireland with waves crashing behind us and part fire performance stuff.
DH: It’s become a quite fiery video, hasn’t it?
JH: There’s just more and more fire being added to it, every time we see an edit, there’s more fire, which is good. It’s like the “Love Is Only a Feeling” video. It’s all about the location and the beauty of that. It is a bit like that in places, but it’s offset by some sexually uncomfortable fire play stuff. I hope I’m not making it sound like a Rammstein video; it’s more of a boylesque thing. Old fashioned fire breathing and stuff like that, circus–esque. Simon Emmett is doing the video and he’s an amazing photographer.
DH: The Cult is one of our biggest influences, Justin and I in particular, both massive fans of certain periods of the Cult. [Looks to Justin] Actually, you listen to all of it.
JH: I love all of it, yeah.
DH: I’m more into Electric.
JH: I’m so into the Cult, I really like the more obscure things, the bootlegs and stuff that we used to get. The Electric album; one of the things that I used to listen to a lot was the Manor Sessions, which is before Rick Rubin told him to put all of his effects pedals to one side and only play a Les Paul through a Marshall. They recorded all their songs in more of the style of the Love album, so it’s more of a goth rock thing and I love all of it from beginning to end; the cock–rock period and all of that. I’m glad, because finally some of that is coming through into what we’re doing.
Some of the things we do sound very AC/DC I suppose, but it’s just very nice to do a very recognizably Cult thing.
DH: Classic riffs all the way through.
“Last of Our Kind”
DH: I guess that’s probably not one of the most ’80s song on the record; possibly one of the most ’80s songs ever made. [Laughs]
JH: The lyric of it is inspired by that film Hawk the Slayer. It’s kind of a swords and sorcery thing. Anyway, Hawk the Slayer, there’s this bit where it’s a little bit like The Hobbit, he’s got a few friends around him; one is a giant, one is an elf, one of them is a dwarf with a hearty appetite and he’s really handy with a whip and there’s a guy who has lost half his hand and is a great crossbow enthusiast.
It’s just about going to battle with the baddie and the elf is lamenting the fact that when they go into this battle, if he is killed, that’s the end of his entire civilization. These baddies have wiped out his whole family and it’s just him, he’s the last of his kind. So, it’s kind of inspired by that.
When you finish an album and you’re sort of getting ready to show it to the press, it does feel like you’re about to pop your head up and charge into battle. I was trying to make it into a song that’s about being an elf that’s going into battle and releasing an album.
DH: It’s got a great guitar solo on it. I haven’t heard a solo like that on a record in a long time.
JH: Since the Top Gun soundtrack! [Laughs] There’s a couple Kenny Loggins guitar solos on the album.
“Roaring Waters”
JH: That one is about the Sack of Baltimore. The Sack of Baltimore is basically when ships come in and they lay a city to siege and you hear it a lot in Game of Thrones. They just wait and fight and take everything. It happened in Ireland in the Dark Ages, I guess. It’s really interesting because it’s just like the Viking invasion, but it happened around the other side of the British Isles and they took 130 people, mostly women, and took them back to be sexed. It was mostly sex trafficking, Medieval sex trafficking; that’s what that song’s about and it’s obviously got a gigantic riff on it, which is really fun to play live and it’s probably my favorite song on the album.
DH: Was it the heaviest? The middle eight is awesome, I love that. The middle eight of that song is the edgiest I think we’ve ever been. It’s got like a Led Zeppelin meets Soundgarden kind of feel to the choruses, in a weird way, I think, but I’m just listening to the guitars, as usual, as fucking usual.
“Wheels of the Machine”
DH: It’s the last track on Side A and it’s the ballad on the record.
JH: One of two ballads, really. We try to put a ballad on every side. Four or five songs should be a side, really.
DH: It’s quite weird song, “Wheels of the Machine.” I personally feel like we forgot to write a chorus for it, but we went ahead and did it anyway. Not every song has to try and sound like a single; it’s got an emotional pull and it pulls you in.
JH: It’s one of the songs that polarizes people, even people that we’ve played it to; maybe we’re married to or working with closely. Some of them love it and some of them don’t get it at all. For the ones that love it, really love it. It’s doing what a Darkness song should do, which is dividing people in a really gentle way. It’s gently ushering people who like it to one side and people who dislike it to the other.
“Mighty Wings”
JH: “Down goes the sun / The end has begun / The Season of Eros and my work is done.” The Season of Eros is a short story that we had to read at school and I remember it being super graphic, sexy; almost like an erotic novella. It was a story about a guy who became totally infatuated with a beautiful woman who was young and pure and literally virginal and wouldn’t surrender her virtue to anybody until marriage. They get married, they have loads and loads of sex, which is all described to the most minute detail, and then the sex wears off and he’s stuck with this woman and they have nothing in common really, it’s quite sad.
DH: Is this the story of life, my friend? It’s not just marriage though, it’s every relationship you have until you find “the one,” isn’t it? Sometimes you don’t fine the one and that’s it, you’re fucked.
JH: Sometimes you find two “ones” at the same time.
DH: Some people find…
JH: Themselves!
“Mudslide”
JH: “Mudslide” is a piece of music we had and we felt like it should be called “Mudslide,” so we had to sort of… the thing about mudslide is, as an expression, hilarious because it could be like an anal sex euphemism and we didn’t want it to be that, we wanted it to actually be about natural disaster.
We had to try to think about the context of writing about a natural disaster, it’s not something we’ve ever been privy to, so we wanted to make it into sort of an ecological thing. The idea of it is that the Earth’s tectonic plates shift and create these kinds of disasters. There’s a slight implication in a lot of movies and a lot of internet stuff that Mother Nature is angry with us because of the way we treat the world, so the character in “Mudslide” is somebody who is totally obsessed with his possessions and cares more for material things and holds more value in that stuff than the people around him and consequently the environment around him. It’s Mother Nature against the really debonaire character who is belligerently getting on with his life.
There is a subtlety in the dramatic monologues because it starts off with a sort of Deep South accent that morphs into a North Yorkshire accent, so tectonic plates have completely split and he he’s still just worried about his gazebo and his smoking jacket.
“Sarah O’Sarah”
JH: She’s a distillation of several women; one of them is my wife, whose name is Sarah, but she’s not Irish and her surname is not O’Sarah. It’s semi–autobiographical, but it’s more of a song about mystical women.
DH: Using the most used woman’s name, probably?
JH: It’s very common, it’s good to sing.
DH: It was going to be Barbara, wasn’t it?
JH: Bertha.
DH: Bertha!
JH: Bertha, lovely Bertha. Make my heart burn.
“Hammer and Tongs”
DH: Have you heard the expression called “going at it hammer and tongs”? Hammer and tongs are two of the most popular tools that you would use in blacksmithery; making swords and that. In England, if you’re having a really heated argument, you’re going at it hammer and tongs. If you’re engaged in coitus and involved in coitus, you’re going at it hammer and tongs. That’s the one that we’re talking about. It’s about having sex with someone all night. I wouldn’t know what that’s like, I’m a virgin. [Laughs] From what I’ve read. [Laughs]
DH: It’s more like Hammer.
JH: Stop, Hammer time! Nobody knows what that song is about, I don’t even think Frank [Poullain, bass] knows, to be honest.
DH: When he first sang it, it was just a bunch of noises. We decided to write a ballad, stick some delay on the guitar sound, Justin comes in with the drum and we’re off. Franky did obviously abandon the bass at the moment, we always have a microphone ready to go when we’re writing in the middle of the room, so he just grabbed that and started singing along and we got as far as the first pre–chorus and he basically made the structure of it; it was just weird, it was garbled.
JH: We had to decipher what he was trying to say because it was obvious that something was within him, he just was feeling it and we had to sort of dig out what we thought it meant.
DH: I think from now on when anyone sings they’re going to make sure when they go to the microphone they’ve got a mouth full of cotton balls and we’ll kind of decipher and make up what we think it should be.
“Million Dollar Strong”
JH: An interesting part about that is that there’s a trumpet part on it which is played by Frankie’s brother, Tim, who also cooked for us while we were writing.
DH: He cooked a lot of lentils on that trip, so in some ways, we provided him with a lot of wind and he re–paid us with a different form of wind. It’s not about farts. What’s it about, Jus?
JH: It’s one of those relationship songs. It’s a struggle, “I’m really miserable” and the pre–chorus is the same as a lot of other songs that we do.
DH: It’s a fun track though; a bag chord changes.
JH: Loads of chord changes in it, a great guitar solo…
DH: Guitar solos, a trumpet solo… it’s basically just a solo–fest.
•»   http://loudwire.com/
Website: http://thedarkness.co.uk/ / http://emilydrums.com/ / https://www.facebook.com/emilydrums
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedarkness
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheActualDarkness
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedarknessofficial
Press: (UK) / (US)
Agent: Adam Saunders at X–Ray Touring
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The Darkness

Last of Our Kind

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