68. Hail Darkness - "Death Divine"

Our third seventies derivative entry.  It wanders around the styles trying them on for style but in the main, It is doom occult rock dripping with erotic malevolence. BUT and there is a but. Hail Darkness don’t exist. Never existed. They are an AI experiment. There is no members, and the intricate back story is all prefabricated. There is a manifesto published that explains the motivations around the process and there is a level of fooled you about the whole thing.

The big issue and the reason it is still here at 68 is that even after it has been revealed that I have been swizzled and it is purely an artificial construct, I still really like the album. I have spent a lot of time contemplating whether to drop it and lots of critics now, knowing it’s a façade, have claimed its rubbish, But the simple fact is that LOTS of us including myself were fooled by it.

Now we know it’s created and concocted by a machine should that change anything? Kraftwerk, one of the most important bands of all time, play computer music. Electro, dance, and rave use exclusively sounds created by a machine. How different is Hail Darkness? The parameters were programmed in in the same way Orbital, Chemical Brothers and Leftfield program their sound. Should we be decrying it or should we see this as the first step in a new world? Because I will stand by the fact I really liked it and it fooled me. Maybe this is the future….