One of Singapore’s well-known art-rock indie bands of instrumental post-rock, they play music in the manner of Isis (sans vocals) or Pelican, or any of those other electric instrumental post-rockers. They play a lot of gigs around Singapore, but I somehow manage to always either miss them for legitimate reasons, or blow them off out of laziness. This is bad, I know. But when I went to a record fair I did buy their two main releases! I understand that the guys in the band are art directors at agencies around town, and it shows in their packaging. The music is pretty cool too – I didn’t like it at first, but it has really grown on me.
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I Am David Sparkle, This Is The New – Seven slabs of instrumental post-rock madness from 2007, these songs are bright, dark and jangly. The best song on the album is “There Is No Time For Love, Only Chaos” (deep!), which has some good metallic moments interspersed with cool Sonic Youth jangling riffs. “Dance Of Death” shows the band trying to do something innovative by bringing in some sort of drum machine sounds, but it’s just a bit too irritating and in-your-face. The untitled bonus track (“Bonus Track”) does this electronic drum thing a bit better, with cool bass sounds, sparkly keyboard, and all sorts of other madness. Very nice.
The packaging is totally insane, there’s no plastic, it’s entirely made out of complexly-folded heavy stock paper – a sewn booklet that seals the CD inside a paper fold. You actually have to slice the heavy paper to get your music, man! The artwork is simply intense arrangement of black lines, in the foldout covers you can read the words “I see shadow movement stalled”. There are other obscured words in the rest of the packaging, but I can’t really make it out.
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I Am David Sparkle, Swords – Swords was released in 2010 and is very similar to the appropriately-titled This Is The New. “Wild Horses” sets things off with some weird guitar effects, some spare drums, layers of guitar sounds, and then driving riff after riff after riff after riff. The whole album is like that, with moments of punchy surf guitar breaking through the dense mix of post-rock. I’m really not sure what “Ghostfuck” is all about, but it sure is pretty noisy. “A Bad Corpse (Your Majesty)” uses some very cool guitar moods to scale the noise down somewhat. “Heights” has some pleasant melodies, it’s good fun. “Jangan” is very chilled out, but builds up very nicely to a pretty brisk rocker. “The New 21″ has cool bass sounds and great riffs. “Sixtysix Calibre” goes nutso with heavy riffs, and also some great slowdown moments. “Everybody Loves Somebody” sounds like a lovely little lullaby, very sweet and pleasant. This may be the best song on the two albums, with its rolling riffs and great emotional maturity. It’s also the longest song they do. “Sleep”, the final track, starts off as a pleasant intertwining of two guitars.
Overall, Swords is a lot more mature than This Is The New, has no fails, and is just generally better-produced and has more drive and variety. I also love the packaging – a simple paper Pac-man shell that spits out a CD. Elegant and unique. I also like how the word “swords” is written in curly medieval calligraphy and then sliced apart.