Shining Light Into Dark Corners

Death in Vegas’ new album, “The Contino Sessions,” opens with “Dirge,” a haunting instrumental with wordless vocals that builds intensely and inexorably, layering sound upon sound until it becomes a sonic funeral pyre. The video for the song is a relentless succession of photographs of gunshot victims, accompanied by brief, written accounts of their deaths.

On another track, “Aisha,” guest singer and lyricist Iggy Pop intones the confession of a serial killer. Elsewhere on the album, raw rock guitars, drums and organ collide violently with jittery electronic roars and squeals.

Meet Richard Fearless and his partner Tim Holmes, a team that has become the new representative of rock’s dark districts. Death in Vegas, which plays the Troubadour on Saturday, has released just two albums, but it has quickly established itself in the enduring subterranean tradition of the Velvet Underground, Iggy’s old band the Stooges, Joy Division, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Nine Inch Nails and other investigators of primal, often disquieting corners of the human condition.

“I dunno, I’ve certainly got a slight element of that in me, but I think it’s more just, like, mood swings,” says London-based Fearless, 27. “You go from very happy to very sad very quickly, and I think euphoria and sadness are very closely related.

“I think there’s a lot of soul on the album. . . . Tim and I put everything we had into this . . . there’s a lot of emotion in it. That’s the difference between this and a lot of other records out at the moment.”

The primal rock of the new album (on the Time Bomb label) is also a world apart from its predecessor, 1997’s “Dead Elvis,” a more scattered work built on hip-hop, dub and electronic elements. The radical change is typical of the ferment and contradictions in which Fearless thrives.

A Synergy of Visual Art, Club Culture and Rock

A prominent DJ, a visual artist whose recent installations evoke Warhol/Velvet Underground multimedia events, Fearless is at ground zero of the synergy among visual arts, club culture and rock.

“Half our studio’s a music studio and half of it’s a graphic studio with a glass divider,” he says, describing the atmosphere during the recording of the new album--which also features vocals by the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie and dance chanteuse Dot Allison, Fearless’ girlfriend.

“I’ve always got films playing, by people like Kenneth Anger to Harry Smith to Stooges documentaries to Billy Wilder’s ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ ” he continues. “We’re constantly watching films in the studio, and there are all my photographs I’ve taken all around on the walls, and all the art reference books. There’s so much visual stuff in the studio, and it’s just so inspiring.”

Fearless’ upbringing explains his attraction to art, and perhaps his artistic restlessness. The son of an engineer father and an art teacher mother, he was born in Zambia and subsequently lived in Bahrain and other outposts. His mother encouraged his interest in painting, and music, often African and jazz, was always playing at home. Fearless’ sister and cousins later introduced him to rock, and while attending art school in England he was transfixed by the acid house movement.

It all comes into play in his records, art and concerts--which on the current tour feature nine musicians and accompanying visuals by his frequent collaborators, the London company Lazy Eye.

Raw guitar rock from a club DJ isn’t the only surprise in “The Contino Sessions.” As Fearless points out, the music progresses from dark to light, ending with the “triumphant” “Neptune City.” That’s not likely to dispel the dark image of Death in Vegas, but it does certify Fearless’ disinterest in fitting a mold.

“I’ve never made a record thinking about anyone else really,” he says. “It would have been very easy to make a very commercial album, but I wouldn’t have got any satisfaction from that, and I think the following that we have kind of respected that and they’re into that, and I think those people are quite excited by the change. . . .

“I want to make the next album as different to this one as this was to the last one. . . . I’ve got a kind of idea which is pretty different; [I’m] thinking about recording it in India and . . . making it more of a love ballad album.”

BE THERE

Death in Vegas, Saturday at the Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, 8 p.m. $16.50. (310) 276-6168.