Phantasmagoria

Along with Fan Death, Diamond Vampires are one of our new favourite bands, a band who intricately weave delicate baroque images through the medium of slow bpm-ed disco aurally painting pale skinned princes on skeletal thrones, sipping blood from champagne flutes and translucently glowing in the inverted shade of the moon. Us nerds can only dream of such wonderfully beautiful violent ways of life in alternate lands (cos Brighton’s too windy and London’s too polluted), so we go about our business dressed in tight jeans, flannel shirts and the various accessories that such people need to complete that look, all the while dreaming that time will shift and the world will be reborn on a new day in 1984 where everyone lives in penthouses that resemble cyclopean spires on limestone citadels.

Diamond Vampires – Lumiere

‘Lumiere’ begins with a synthesized coda of pulses through fragile porcelain that stirs the inner ghost, but then the drumbeat knocks the steady rhythm a few degrees to the side and the song becomes 3D, arching outwards with beams of molten electric blue. A collection of spheres of bright white congregate around a clearing in a forest where a statue has fallen to its death from atop a freshly opened tomb. A vampiric corpse is crawling across the arid and dusty ground of the forest, the strobing lights of the city mirrored in the tarnished silver of its hungry eyes.

Now don’t get us wrong, we aren’t saying that Solale Christabelle is a vampire, but when she sings from high above on all the tracks she has appeared on, there is a certain ethereal queen of the damned aloofness to her, not arrogance, but like some omniscient beauty that sings with the solar system in perfect harmony that only an infinite soul can understand and therefore utilise.

Christabelle gifted Lindstrom with her vocals on ‘Music In My Mind’, ‘Let’s Practice’ and ‘Let It Happen’ (with yet more to come), transforming those tracks into musical scrolls found under giant fiery mountains, read out loud on the charred grounds of the summit by the deity of hazily psychotropic disco, an epic tale of lifelong struggles on alien worlds embedded between each stutter and fluctuation from the synths. Now, Dennis Jr. receives the same treatment.

Dennis Jr (feat. Christabelle) – Looking for Love (Downbeat)

This universe appears amongst microscopic beams of light in the reflection on the effervescent waves that lap at the shores of Mars. Theres a warm hum of fractured gravity running throughout and the last remnants of a great robotic army now lying rusted in the dust provide a minimal percussion as the wind glides through the bullet holes in twisted armour. Christabelle is shrouded in a hooded silvery wrap, cooing to the far off quasars for a hero to come and rescue her from loneliness.

With all this talk of Mars, disco and the undead, its no surprise that we come across Glass Candy for the final act. We have not visited for a while as we have still been reeling from the visit that the Italians made to the UK in May. We, like the rest of the audience, were left with eyes blinded by frozen moonbeams, and ears deafened by imploding mirrorballs and exploding crystals pyramids, flecking us with the blood of brave androids and the sweat of fiendish disco-nymphs. It was a lot to get over, but we made it.

Glass Candy – Animal Imagination (Instrumental)

‘Animal Imagination’ as a vocal-less affair is a galaxy spanning tale of crashing space-cruisers, the imposing power of mother nature on other planets, the stillness of automated cities at night, the sound of black holes as they consume entire star systems, the ageless movement of tectonic plates and the blur that follows beautiful people slow-dancing in Studio 54 – no drugs, just the love.