“Taking NO steps back. Comply? Fuck that!”
There are some albums that so comprehensively distil the anger you feel towards the state of the world right now that you get chills listening to them, and both lyrically and sonically, dälek’s Brilliance Of A Falling Moon is such an album. The lines that open this review are from the second track, ‘Knowledge | Understanding | Wisdom’ and they stood out like a rage manifesto for this album.
dälek (Will Brooks) along with Mike Mare have created a soundscape that is unrelenting and nightmarish, something that could reflect a dystopian future but chillingly represents the here and now: a world of vanity wars, the rise of global fascism, weaponised prejudice, anti-social media (what dälek raps is a “deceitful deluge of misinformation”), and the constant erosion of people’s rights. The title takes its name from Erik Larson’s 2011 novel In The Garden of Beasts which is set in Berlin between 1933-1934 against the backdrop of Hitler’s rise to power. Given the narcissistic and sycophantic abuse of power in Trump’s America the parallels are not a stretch.
“Established fallacies. Alternate realities. You a non-factor, it just a formality. I for one never Numb to brutality. So impressed how they’ve normalized tragedy” (from
Will Brooks says of the album, “The whole project was very influenced by what’s happening in the world and this country. During the initial days of the I.C.E. raids, it got me thinking. You see those powerful photos from the sixties when Black men were marching with the ‘I AM A MAN’ sandwich board signs. It was powerful then; it’s powerful now.”
Words and music have rarely been so perfectly fused in an angry symbiosis. The beats are gritty and sparse and underpin coruscating sounds that lurch and churn around the words. Glitches, distorted guitar, and angry choirs on ‘Better Than’, string stabs and unsettling synth washes on ‘Knowledge | Understanding | Wisdom’ and ‘Expressions of Love’, ghostly piano loops on ‘Substance’ and haunting violin on ‘For The People. The backing goes right to the edge, never fully descending into total chaos, but perfectly capturing the queasy feeling that we are all teetering on the cliff edge praying we don’t go over. Praise is also due to the cover image by Paul Romano which perfectly captures the album’s medium and message in an image that reveals more and more the longer you look at it.
As with every dälek release his voice is a lighthouse on a stormy night. The clarity of determination, content and execution makes Will Brooks one of the most seminal voices in rap now. Brilliance Of A Falling Moon is an album that shines a light on how “Y’all Gave a voice to the Dumb” to “incinerate the infrastructure” and how “civil discourse devolves to violence” but while the words could terrify dälek has a way emboldening the listener by speaking truth to power, his words are a scalpel that seeks to “RIP out the cancer”.
I’ll leave the last word to Brooks, “When you listen to this, I hope you walk away with hope because we’re still fighting, building, and pushing.”
dälek: Facebook | Instagram | Website
Review by Paul F Cook
Keep up to date with all new content on Joyzine via our
Facebook | Bluesky | Instagram | Threads | Mailing List