I test drove a car yesterday and
was mistaken for a musician. I won’t deny it felt good. Now I just have to
decide if I want to buy the car…
Disc 1122 is… Parts of Speech
Artist: Dessa
Year of Release: 2013
What’s up with the Cover? A storm of hair. This looks
great in a photo, but if you’re trying to cross the street with your hands full
it is all kinds of annoying.
How I Came To Know It: I discovered Dessa through her 2018
album, “Chime” and dug backwards through her collection from there.
How It Stacks Up: I have three Dessa records (I’m on the lookout
for a fourth). Of those three, I put “Parts of Speech” in third. Hey – someone has
to be last.
Ratings: 3 stars but almost 4
Look
through my music collection and you want find very much pop-flavoured hip hop,
but sometimes an artist is so good you forget your musical predilections. So it
is with Minneapolis based pop/hip hop/spoken word artist Margret Wander, aka
Dessa.
As noted
above, “Parts of Speech” is not my favourite Dessa album but it is far better
than most of vacuous hip hip suffusing every award show I mistakenly tune in
hoping for better (are the I Heart Radio awards even a real thing?). Whether
she is singing, speaking or rapping Dessa is not content to go on about status,
possessions and empty anthems. Instead, she infuses her songs with courageous explorations
of grief, mental illness, and very real expressions of power, grounded in experience
and resilience.
The
songs that are the most radio friendly on the album aren’t my favourites, but
it is something of a crime that Dessa didn’t hit big with “Parts of Speech”. “Skeleton Key” is a pop anthem if ever
there was one, with a catchy hook and a danceable back beat. Somewhere out
there are some twenty something playfully bumping rumps, fist pumping and
singing along to “Skeleton Key.” The
thought gives me hope for the leaders of tomorrow.
Dessa is
part of the music collective Doomtree (along with fellow Odyssey dweller
P.O.S.). The Doomtree Collective prides itself on thought-provoking rap and
innovative beats. Dessa does both and keeps it easy on the ears while doing it.
“Warsaw” has some pseudo-African
beats married to eighties inspired synth and a little jazz piano in the
background.
The
combination shouldn’t work but it does, partly because while she adds a lot of
elements, Dessa keeps the arrangement sparse and gives it room to breathe and accommodate
her raps. Those raps have an easy constant flow that makes you almost forget how
furious and in your face they are. On “Warsaw”
Dessa chimes in with:
“And I’ve done some living in a
glass house
High note blew the motherfucking
walls off
And I sleep
With both eyes open
Standing up
Alone and holding
Off the rust
And I’m still living by my maiden
name
The name I came with
The name I made
And I’m bare-faced at your
masquerade
Filled a flask up before I came.”
It is a
message of unapologetic honesty and furious inner rhyme. If you don’t want to
hear what Dessa wants to tell you, by all means shut the record off. You’ll
only be hurting yourself though.
“Annanabelle” shows Dessa’s softer side, delivering
a lyrical poem over a classical arrangement she channels some kind of Gothic poet
on the verses and then sings the chorus with the gentle lilt of an angel at sea.
The song is about mental illness, so it is an angel lost at sea, but an angel
nonetheless. Best line:
“You’re in the bathroom with a
flashlight
You’re trying to weigh your
shadow
Yeah, you say it’s gotten heavy,
hard to drag across the floor.”
Halfway
through the album, Dessa does a cover of Springsteen’s “I’m Going Down” and nails it. Her soft vocals bring a new vulnerability
and uncertainty to a song that is already about the unsteady ground of a
failing relationship.
Dessa
isn’t afraid to push metaphor, working in songs like “Fighting Fish” and “Beekeeper,”
the latter comparing the smoke used to keep bees docile with the dangers of being
sleepy in the face of inequity. Heady stuff.
And for old-schoolers
like me, “Parts of Speech” even has a nifty CD case, featuring a pull-tab
system for checking out each the lyrics to each song. In 2013 this kind of
printed extravagance was almost unheard of.
The only
thing that holds this album back a little are the moments that feel a bit too
soaked in pop production, and I would’ve preferred a starker approach. For
stuff this thought-provoking it tends to let your ear gloss over the message in
places where it is worth paying attention.
For this
reason it comes in last in my collection, but still almost pulls out four
stars.
Best
tracks: Warsaw,
I’m Going Down, Annabelle, It’s Only Me
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