REVIEW: The Pendulum Swings, Whisperin’ and Hollerin’

September 11, 2026 | Simon Phillips

The Pendulum Swings is the first new album from Deardarkhead in 10 years, since the bands last album Strange Weather, the Press release claims it is 25 years since they put an album out, but I have my review copy of Strange Weather here and that press release makes clear it was all new music. They originally formed in 1988 in Atlantic City, when the bands singer left them in 2009 they decided to continue as an instrumental indie act. They went back to record the album at Miner Street recordings in Philadelphia where they produced Strange Weather. This album was produced, mixed and engineered by Brian McTear and Amy Morrisey and mastered by Joe McTear. Deardarkhead are Kevin Harrington, Robert Weiss, Brandon Howard and special guest Joe McGinty.

The album opens with Flamethrower that starts quite sparsely and then explodes like the flames are literally shooting out of the speakers and this intense instrumental keeps that bands post punk sound. Coming Undone is a feeling many of us have in the 2020's more like the world's Coming Undone and searing guitar lines and precision drumming are the right soundtrack for our current travails.

Tomorrowland is a rather more hopeful sounding tune, a bit Psychedelic Furs meets Love Tractor sounding like it would work on the dancefloor of a good alternative club. Tears is a touch slower and more reflective, built around a guitar figure that trickles down, like tears slowly falling from your eyes. In places this soars like you are finally feeling better, before it goes downhill again.

Sad Songs (And Better Days) has some cool jangling guitars and percussion that shines through the sadness of our times. The guitars build in intensity and fly off in places like they are raging with anger at what they see.

Letting Go feels like they have turned a New Order electronic tune into an instrumental guitar romp, making it work damn well, through all the rising and falling peaks and troughs this seems to signal. A Thanksgiving has crystalline guitars and almost marching band drumming evoking feelings of A Thanksgiving celebration of some sort.

Black Pearls seems to be suitably beautiful, riding the waves in search of a locker or two, the drums seem to mark the times of the watches, guitars exploring the depths. In Another Life this would be the backdrop to the discovery of something amazing at the end of a film, with the main characters slowly walking off screen into the distance.

The album closes with The Pendulum Swings that thankfully doesn't remind me of the band Pendulum, this is slow building, like much of Strange Weather it reminds me of Atlases, in how it evokes a whole vista of imagery quite effortlessly.

Our Rating: 7/10

http://www.whisperinandhollerin.com/reviews/review.asp?id=26114

REVIEW: Strange Weather, Whisperin' & Hollerin'

February 29, 2016 | simonovitch

Our Rating: 7 out of 10 stars

Apparently Deardarkhead having been going since 1988 and have somehow totally passed me by until I was sent the band's latest album Strange Weather to review. This is a band who decided that after the singer left it was better to not replace him and become an instrumental shoegaze band instead which is at least a novel approach as to how to continue.

This also means that to this listener the albums 6 tracks over 26 minutes becomes pretty much one suite of music a kind of aural backwash that reminds me in places of one of the only other instrumental shoegaze band's that spring to mind which is Atlases. Only Deardarkhead seem to play a little bit quicker than Atlases and it also reminds me in places of the instrumental passages that Amusement Parks On Fire often have in their songs.

The opening piece may be called Falling Upward but it feels to me like we are descending slowly down a long spiral staircase into a dark room in which all sorts of odd things might be happening. Like seeing Sunshine Through The Rain that seems to have sped up an old Magic Hour tune and taken some of the acid drenching out of it almost like it's been rinsed in the rain. Is that a Nightmare well of course not as Juxta mare unfolds across the widescreen of the listeners mind enveloping them in the soundscape.

Then about halfway through on March Hares they seem to have some of the sort of repeating motif you might find on some of Band Of Susans instrumentals. Either way this is an album of well-constructed sonic architecture and soundscapes of the sort that you sometimes hear in the closing five minutes or so of any number of American procedural tv series as they finally find out who did the murder on Cold Case or as the killer looks back on what might have been on CSI as if this is the real Ice Age a tune that owes a small debt to the Joy Division song it shares a name with but only a very small debt as this conjures up feelings of longing for what's been lost.

The album closer Thinking Back seems perfect for driving late at night through a forest in the pouring rain hoping for some respite and that you won't have to drive in this rain much longer.

Either way this is an intriguing album.

http://www.whisperinandhollerin.co.uk/reviews/review.asp?id=12814