Segue Of Life

Jumping behind a duo, even a pair of friends, which have been playing music together for a decade, would sound like a daunting prospect for most. For Dean Hamilton, however, he knew he'd made the right decision from the outset.

“It's a pretty serendipitous story the way I got involved with DarkLab,” Hamilton explains. ““Andy [Edwards – guitar] was at a pub one day when I happened to walk by and he ran outside and said, 'Oh man, we just lost our drummer for this gig; can you come in and help us out – just play one gig?' And I was like, 'Ummm, yeah okay', because I'd just come off the back of a few failed projects so I was bit wary; I was a bit sick of everything really. But I thought Andy was a good guy so I'd do him a favour. So we did this gig at the Beetle Bar about eighteen months ago, and I just loved it so much and loved the music so much that I just decided this is where it's at for me and it's just gone from strength to strength.”

Since that chance encounter, Brissie three-piece DarkLab have been going from strength to strength, putting “cosmic spice” on their songs to get them into a form where they are now finally ready to be heard, the band on the cusp of releasing their new EP, Number One. Their sound is a tricky one to pin down – it touches on hard rock, prog, dub and jazz, just to name a few.

“The way that I hear it is that it's more influenced by almost like a pop structure,” Hamilton reasons. “A lot of what I notice is that when we play live people who haven't necessarily heard our material before find themselves singing along by our second chorus. Like one of our tracks Valvoline in the chorus has 'So good, so good – Valvoline' and it does that a couple of times. By the end of the track you look out into the audience and people are whacking their arms up in the air singing along.

“We twist the songs up, put them down, do all kinds of things,” he continues. “Another thing we like to do during our live acts is to go through these little segues from one song to another. We've got the DarkLab Draco descending weird segue, then we've got the Dirty Harry segue that sounds like the theme from Shaft and it's a really fun way of playing live.”

Hamilton explains that when the trio, completed with bass player Juan Hamchez, lock horns in the studio or on stage, that no musical ground is off limits. But even though they are experimenting with every song, the band still manage to leave their signature on their sound. “We throw anything at anything,” Hamilton says. “But everything we do we put that DarkLab stamp on it; it's this sort of pseudo psychedelic far out interpretation of a fixed genre like country. We have a reggae song that we do, we have the straight ahead rock'n'roll stuff and we've got balls to the wall punk tracks that you couldn't necessarily call punk because they just have this weird, cosmic paint over them. But even though we cross genres, there is definitely this DarkLab fingerprint that shows up on everything.”