By Keith Walsh
Julian Shah-Tayler is happily busy these days. In addition to his Depeche Mode tribute Strangelove and his Bowie tribute playing frequent live shows as the pandemic wanes, he’s also playing a vampire in the immersive theater experience “Hollywood And Vamp” at The Bourbon Room, in Hollywood.
As if that wasn’t enough, Shah-Tayler still finds time to work through love relationships and write songs about them as a solo artist. His latest, “Darkling Universe” finds the British-born singer songwriter, who now makes Los Angeles his home, struggling with all of the passions and expectations that come with falling deeply in love. “It’s about trying to navigate that whole sort of feeling,” he told me, “when it’s overwhelmed your thoughts continually. It’s almost like everything else is subsumed under this one particular thing.” In this case, the letter “U” is assigned to both “Universe,” as well as “University” for all of the lessons to be learnt in love.
The song has echoes of Lord Byron’s poem from 1816, “Darkness”. Indeed, both Byron and Shah-Tayler possess a poet’s soul that wrestles with a restless dissatisfaction, wishing the universe would conform to an idealist’s vision. “The lyric is quite straightforward,” said Shah-Tayler. “It’s wishing for things to be easier. Sometimes the expectations that you put onto a situation don’t unfold the way you’d like them to. So you’re trying to find a reset button I guess. That is the concern of the song. ‘Wish I could go back to the start/Pull all my stupid apart.’ It’s all about you get so heavily enraptured and so carried away with one thing, and one thought and one direction, that you need to go back to zero. Let go to move forward, if that makes sense.”
The song rocks in unexpected ways, tricking the ear with unexpected beat drops and hard guitars that come and go. Radiohead and Muse are a couple of reference points, both bands acquainted with anxious passion. It’s how Shah-Tayler portrays these feelings, keeping them under complete control of his instruments and voice, that makes the track worthy of repeat plays.
Studio Wizardy
The musical background for this drama is everything you’d expect from a studio wizard. As is often the case with his projects, all the instruments on “Darkling Universe” are performed by Shah-Tayler. The intro features funky bass. “I recorded something like six basslines with David J’s bass, because I felt that it spoke to me in some way. I feel as though it might be, because that’s where the song derives from, is the bassline. ” For the rest of the song, Shah-Tayler added a bass line from the Novation Bass Station II. “I’m pretty much using that on most of the synth bass that I’m doing at the moment, because it’s got the sub oscillator and it’s got the two oscillators, and I’ve got my dialed in sounds. That one doesn’t have the sub, but it’s just backing up the kick drum, if I remember right.”
For the kick drum, Shah-Tayler used a sample of the Linn Drum, with a snare that’s derived from the Roland TR-808. There are some other studio secrets involved – for example in the searing guitars on the track. “I always use a Clapton Strat,” said Shah-Tayler, “that’s the only guitar I ever play. I’m putting it through a Big Muff, the stereo wide one. It’s played three times. There’s the wide stereo, which is the Big Muff. It’s the EHX Big Muff, and I have the (Boss) DS-1 distortion, which is the distortion for the central, kind of more high crunchy one. “
As for the other synths they’re all hardware – Shah-Tayler has shunned virtual synths on his recordings of late. For this track, he used an Alesis Fusion HD, a Korg Minilogue, and a Juno 106, in addition to the Novation Bass Station II.
“Darkling Universe” was expertly mixed by Nathan Van Hala, and is available on all streaming platforms, and has a tasty video on YouTube.
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Julian Shah-Tayler On YouTube
https://thesingularitymusic.bandcamp.com/
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