Written by: Dave Cantrell

If for nothing else we can rate the just-released Everyone I Know is Falling Apart, the debut LP from Dark Globes – a couple singles preceded – for introducing the word ‘midtro’ into our musical vocabulary, thereby completing the ‘tro’ family that until now only consisted of the originator ‘intro’ and the (I believe) Bonzo Dog Band-invented ‘outro,’ a lonely couple now made whole by this fledgling quintent from Southend-on-the-Sea. Of course if that were it this review would be over and we’d move on. Happily, there’s plenty more to talk about between that trio of ‘tro’s.’

Guiding themselves nimbly through the type fertile landscape that results when Dean Wareham vaults furtively from t he backseat of his mellow road warrior Galaxie 500 into fields equally seeded by the likes of Kurt Vile and Jackie Leven, the band have arrived at an impressively arresting sound. The loose poppy sashay of “Do What You Want” that’s like Wilco in ‘stoner sublime’ mode, the darkened alley spook and haunt of “Air,” its claustrophobic atmospherics rather belying its title, the purposely off-key straggler guitar that helps lend “Davey’s House” its abandoned-heart vibe, “Bad Luck”‘s tone of lovely, echoplexed sorrow that’s the musical equivalent of a once color-saturated, now faded holiday Polaroid, “Never Let Me Down” crashing melancholy into hope as if in some sort of emotional Hadron collider, all of these proving Dark Globes (Tom Burgess, Leighton Jennings, Andrew Moore, Richard Onslow, and Chris Richardson) adept beyond-their-years at a mesmerizing brand of conflictual, damage-strewn pop that’s nonetheless irreducibly seductive. They leave us with a cynical delicacy between despair and reverie, a state made no more manifest than on the penultimate (pre-“Outro”) “All For You,” a murmuring paean to romantic self-sacrifice soaked in immortal – perhaps inevitable – futility.

Heartbreak and joy, it’s what we’re made of, an unsolvable dilemma captured with grace on this auspicious first step. Here’s “Never Let Me Down” and find the order link below:

[order Everyone I Know is Falling Apart here]