Cornish, Dale

Cornish, Dale

Altruism

The Death Of Rave

The Death of Rave come off life support with a definitive new full length by original rave deconstructionist and observant storyteller Dale Cornish, reflecting on the experience of gender-affirming surgery and the way people treat each other over ruggedly skewed dance music and bittersweet ballads crooned in pure Cronx tongue. It’s fully out-there, but a big big RIYL aya, HTRK, Leslie Winer, CoH, Pan Sonic.One of the UK’s most fascinating DIY figures, Dale Cornish’s catalogue spans wry electroclash with No Bra, thru to Baraclough (aka the “Gay Whitehouse”) in the naughts, and then a notable streak of LPs in the 2010s that drily, playfully sowed the seeds for deconstructed club musics. In this decade, Dale strikingly found his voice on ‘Thug Ambient’ (2020) and the brilliant ‘Traditional Music of South London’ (2022), with the latter betraying a maturity of songwriting and displaced drum programming that finely braided his binds with the avant garde, ‘90s alt.rock and leading-edge queer club culture in a properly distinctive style.Dale’s 2nd album for TDoR ‘Altruism’ now sees him further come into his own with 14 songs that sweat the small and big stuff - romance, friendship, capriciousness, and the process of transforming into “the body you deserve, the body of your dreams” (salute, HTRK!). On one level the album can be heard to chime with the times’ phase-shift to literal and upfront honesty, whilst on another it is offset with a rudely witted, pleasure-seeking palate of brute and sensory electronic pulses and tones, as rooted...