- Darren Sylvester is a visual artist who, through reverential tributes to the visual art of kitschy, 80’s pop-culture, found he had a passion for it’s aural dimensions, too. He first really indulged that passion on a self-titled record for Unstable Ape back in 2009. He’s back for another go, releasing a new record entitled Off By Heart with Chapter Music. He’s maintained his fixation with the era and the record is immersed in the influence of 80’s pop, utterly immersed. Talking about his own style, the references begin right away and continue in a cavalcade: Bowie, Kate Bush, ELO’s Jeff Lynne, Prince, Foreigner, Billy Idol. The result is such a pastiche that it’s hard to find any single overriding link between Sylvester and his many fascinations. He does reach out, beyond that golden era and into the Brit-pop of the 90s, naming the melodrama of Suede’s Bernard Butler as a touchstone. Personally I’ve been trying to find an echo of Sylvester’s vocal strains in my memory, and I think that might be it. The two singers do have a certain something in common when it comes to nasal crooning.

I’m not always certain it works quite as convincingly for Sylvester. His off-key tones share a bit in common with the jangle-pop kids that make up much of the roster of his new label, Chapter Music. Where it’s stylistically appropriate for them, however, or say for jagged, early ‘80s artifacts like Siouxsie & The Banshees or even Joy Division, it’s not the sort of thing you’d hear in an Eric Carmen hit, is it? It’s the sort of thing that Lost Animal achieves by being so thoroughly ironic (and again, the two vocalists do share some similarities), but perhaps Sylvester’s approach isn’t cynical or twisted enough to gain the same benefit, he affectionately invokes the sounds of the originals, but can’t really be an 80’s megastar. I’m distinctly ambivalent about this element of his repertoire and don’t know if it makes it across the line or not.

That’s at least partially because, by the same token, appreciating Sylvester’s new album Off By Heart through a straight-up gothic sensibility shouldn’t be discounted, either. Sylvester does like to flood his pop songs with ghostly reverb, not to the same extent as that new wave poltergeist John Maus, but enough to give you more than an ethereal chill or two.

Just as with Chapter’s other big ‘80s time-traveller Geoffrey O’Connor, I’m not sure that things always come together for Darryl Sylvester, but when they do: the bent warbling, the gothic undertones and the clearly passionate ardour for the ‘80s can be infectious indeed. Cuts like single Dream Or Something Like It are beautiful, thrumming new wave wonders, even if the album as a whole is not everything I want. My feelings will just have to remain unsettled, much like the 80s themselves, traumatised by a gory Margaret Thatcher or two for every righteous Siouxsie Sioux, full of darkness and uncertainty.

- Chris Cobcroft.