Den

For starters, we have a solid foundation for the stomach: cheese puffs made with aged Comté. Den have mastered this opening bite, an amusing and gentle snack. Yes, you’ve heard: Den moved out of the darkness and the chilly cold and have moved inside The Restaurant. They’ve commandeered the kitchen and present a greater depth of flavour and culinary nuance. You might remember them first as a food track in a Marrickville back alley where they served a damaged blend of salty post punk and psychedelic hardcore, salt in the hair and salt on the skin, and then a delivery service of ultra minute, dense bites on their Deep Cell LP. Years of experimenting and balancing flavours have encouraged them to embrace a restraint and subtlety with Post Pink, a truly new sound and direction for the band that honours their culinary legacy.

Post Pink infers a certain kind of comfort that you might not anticipate in the wake of their previous output. By this I mean, the ears do not bleed! There is a similar density to the new album, but in place of the sharpened rapier poking deep in your head and puncturing your eardrum, Post Pink has an ethereal quality much like you’d love about Wire’s 154. The weight and solemnity of Deep Cell has lifted, the weightless lyrics will hit you with a brilliant mash of imagery in a way that you love about Brian Eno’s lyricism, some silly moments with words like “happenstance”, copulating jellyfish, a frog in a bowl of onion soup. The descriptors I’ve used are all present in this delightful little dish: light, playful, weightless and comforting. I would say this about other records that I feel have balanced flavours with Post Pink and would have shared some gastronomic insights: John Cale’s Paris 1919 and Brian Eno’s Before and After Science are two that come to mind.

--Daniel Stewart (Total Control, Straightjacket Nation, UV Race)