“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
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A darkstar is blazing across the night sky. You watch it, you know you shouldn’t but you want to get closer. Want to touch it, to feel it, even to taste it, but most importantly you want to burn with it. You want to self-destruct. Burn out. Tear up your contract with life. Free yourself from the wicked oppression of cognition.
‘Darkstar’ tells a frantic tale of curiosity, deviance, hedonism and madness. It is a parable cautioning against the pursuit of pleasure, a review of the hedonism paradox and an attempt at creating a self-defeating prophecy so that we don’t end up losing our way down the same dark road as many of our beloved artists gone by... RIP.
“Like a Nick Cave and Hans Zimmer co-produced soundtrack for the film adaptation of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell”, it’s simultaneously dark, epic and kitschy. Les Miserables, space synth and the mental health epidemic thrown together in a rusty blender, producing a bitter juice that both disorientates and inoculates.
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All songs written and performed by The Graves. Additional vocals on ‘Darkstar!’ by Calum Bolland. ‘Morals’ text written by Calum Bolland and performed by Jeff Collier. Additional vocals by Sophie Barker. Saxophone performed by David Heim. Produced and engineered by Fabio Buemi and Leo Braukmann-Pugsley. Photos by Geiler Scheiß.
