REVIEW: Delerium, Semantic Spaces (Nettwerk)
- Al Crawford
The duo of Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber have been exceptionally busy this year, with no fewer than four albums under their belt. Semantic Spaces, their first release on Nettwerk, was just one of three Delerium albums (the other two being Spheres and Spheres II) released this year, and they've also put out one Front Line Assembly album.
Semantic Spaces is, however, something of a departure from previous Delerium releases, and is perhaps the most overtly commercial album they ever released under the Delerium name. While earlier Delerium releases weren't exactly like peas in a pod, they had certain stylistic features in common. They were uniformly dark in feel and often eschewed any obvious rhythm in favour of an unstructured, ambient approach. Thematically, they were by turns medieval, middle-eastern, tribal and spacey.
However, while Delerium have probably been the most critically well-received Leeb/Fulber project, commercial success has eluded them. This was at least partly due to the musical style - moody, atmospheric soundscapes have never exactly been top 40 material - and also because of their being released on the tiny, Berlin-based Dossier label. This made their releases both difficult to find and expensive.
Semantic Spaces changes all that. Bill Leeb has as much as admitted that this album, radically different from anything Delerium have done before, was deliberately more commercial than earlier releases. It's also on the Canadian Nettwerk label, thus making it easier to find in North America (and not *too* difficult to find in Europe).
So what's changed? Quite a lot - the re-modelled Delerium is considerably more dancefloor friendly than before, and it's unlikely to be coincidental that the new mixture of relaxed dance beats, chants (both Gregorian and tribal) and ethereal female vocals bears a strong resemblance to the hugely successful Enigma. The sales of this album (in Canada at least) appear to indicate that this shift of direction has proved commercially successful.
This is not a short album. While albums that touch eighty minutes aren't hugely uncommon in the ambient/dance genre (where one suspects the artists often just stretch the tracks out to fill all available space) Semantic Spaces seems fairly tight, and if tracks are stretched out a little longer than they should be it's usually done quite stylishly and without repetitive overkill.
While none of the tracks stray far outside the territory previously staked out by Enigma, they do vary quite considerably within those limited parameters. Two of them feature vocals by Kirsty Thirsk (courtesy of Nettwerk labelmates Rose Chronicles) which vary between dubiously croaky and pleasantly attractive and airy. I'd stop short of the inlay's description of them as angelic however, and the lyrics she's actually singing are almost ludicrously bad in places. Other tracks feature various combinations of Enigma-esque Gregorian chant, assorted ethnic vocal borrowings and even hints of dub reggae.
The music over which this mixture of vocal ingredients is spread is equally interesting. While the prominent beat is atypical of most past Delerium releases, there are still traces of the old Delerium sound that poke through in places, and the sound is also often reminiscent of the first, self-titled album by Intermix, Leeb and Fulber's dance/house experiment.
Overall, I'm quite impressed. It may lack the challenge and originality of previous Delerium releases but it makes for excellent background listening, having just enough meat to it to be interesting without demanding a great deal of attention. I'd hesitate to compare it to earlier Delerium albums - they're just too different stylistically - but anyone who likes Enigma should check this out, particularly if they were also impressed by Intermix.
