Death In June - Nada!

Nada! is my favourite Death In June record. Brown Book is kind of similar but I prefer Nada! for its dominating dark 80s synthpop vibes and martial background. There’s also less Nazi imagery flirtation going on here, which is always a plus. I believe that this album was the last the group did as a three piece; and seems a fry cry from the acoustic solo project that Death In June has been for so many years now.

I love the dense electronic sound on most of these tracks. I’ll have to find out what equipment was used here, especially the drum machine (not so I can go out and get one, but see if any .wav rips exist that I can import into iDrum or something like that). “The Honour Of Silence” opens things up on a haunting, sombre note (what else would you expect though?), and “The Calling MKII” sounds like it could have been in regular circulation on the radio back 25 years or so. “Rain Of Despair”, “Foretold” and “Carousel” bring those dark synth vibes in by the truckload, which is just what I want. My favourite track though has to be “Crush My Love” with its excellent synth lead and unusual vocal approach (for DIJ). To top it off, Nada! is probably the best place to start with Death In June, although I could be slightly biased.

Death In June - Brown Book

Death In June is one strange-ass project. For something as simple as acoustic, folky shit, DIJ sure do have a wide, eccentric discography. Brown Book is pretty weird. Death In June's lazy campfire strumming and monotone vocal meets 80s-to-the-max drum programming and fairly awful female vocals. It kinda sounds like a poor man's mid-career Swans. I might be slightly biased here however, and even factually incorrect as Death In June were doing this kind of thing first.

Although, for some reason that isn't entirely clear to me yet, I quite like this. Perhaps it is because I am pretty interested in some other DIJ material, and this is just a perplexing variant on that sound. It is almost soothing, yet at the same time quite unsettling. "Red Dog - Black Dog" is like a cross between a lullaby and a nightmare. "Hail! The White Grain" and "Runes And Men" must be deliberately Third Reich-y? "We Are The Lust" is almost ritual like, with thumping percussion, haunting synth work and chanted vocal mantra. "Burn Again" rounds everything off with a menacing yet pensive tone. 

Make what you will of the nazi-related imagery (but they ain't nazis, yo - it's art, see?), but all in all this is a pretty interesting recording, if you have an open mind.