Happy Hallowe’en! Hallowe’en is my all time favourite holiday. Technically it isn’t a holiday, but it should be. I’ve always been an avowed fan of horror, and Hallowe’en is Christmas for us creeps.
Given tonight is the night that spirits walk the earth again with the living, it is appropriate (although still totally random) that tonight’s band being reviewed is called “Dehd”.
Disc 1686 is…Flower of Devotion
Artist: Dehd
Year of Release: 2020
What’s up with the Cover? The black and white drama of drama masks! This cover does not capture the excitement of the theatre. Maybe local theatre.
How I Came To Know It: I read a couple reviews of this record, both of them favourable. Not that the favourable part matters to me. I’m more interested in what the review says about what I can expect stylistically than whether the critic likes it. I’ll decide that for myself. I encourage you to do the same after you read this review. But only after. I will not be ignored!
How It Stacks Up: I have two Dehd albums and of the two “Flower of Devotion” is best so that makes it…#1. Math!
Rating: 4 stars
Dehd is what would have happened if the eighties died but then came back from the grave with an unearthly energy about them. Like maybe meteor dust reanimated them or something.
The music has all the underpinnings of eighties pop like Echo & the Bunnymen or the Cure. The echoing guitar and the haunting mood pieces that make you think of cold city streets slick with rain, where young people pine about stuff and things.
Infused into this gloom is a strange pervasive energy (presumably the meteor dust) that gives this music a newfound vibrance. There is a restless jump in the arrangements that is part Ally Sheedy, part Molly Ringwald. Let’s call it “Goth princess” or maybe “all night diner club”.
Whatever it is, these tunes cast a spell on you from the opening notes. There is a rolling repetition to the guitar licks that make you feel like you are falling and never landing. The songs only last three or four minutes, but while they’re on time seems to slow and blur. When they end there is no abrupt cessation, but nor is there a cheap fade out. They just kind of complete right when they are supposed to. Before you can figure out how it happened, you are being lifted into the next track.
There is an overly moody feeling to “Flower of Devotion” that in lesser hands would come off as false and maudlin. Dehd dances around their anxiety and despair in a way that makes you feel like you’re at a late-night Goth party, and it is the best time ever. It isn’t all danceable, but it is all sway-able, and sometimes all we need is a good sway.
The record’s best tune is “Loner” principally because of Emily Kempf’s vocal gymnastics which are part angel, part yelping dog, but full of rich and ranging emotion. The guitar on this tune has a big eighties style echo that feels like you’re underwater, or maybe made of smoke. Hopefully not both. That would just be bubbles. Awesome bubbles of sound, but still bubbles. But I digress…
On tunes like “Apart” it made me wonder if this is what it would sound like if Goth kids took up surfing. At night, obviously, but there is a slow chill element that doesn’t stray into sad so much as into deep contemplation.
Lyrically, there isn’t much that approaches the inspirational. The lyrics are basic and feel like fleeting phrases of discarded poems more than fully formed narratives. That’s OK, since it perfectly matches the music. This record is about tone, mood and depth of feeling, not about telling a particular story. The closest I came was on “No Time” a relatively up-tempo number which admonishes, “you only want me when you’re sad.” This isn’t a revelation worth noting but is probably someone you’ve met at some point in your life. Hopefully you did not move in with them but if you did, these things happen. Here’s a song for when you break up.
“Flower of Devotion” is one of my favourite albums of 2020. It didn’t make my top ten list, but it fell just outside of it in the 11-15 range and on any given day could crack the main lineup. I loved every moment of my short time listening, and am sad to be moving on so soon, but I know I’ll have pulled it off my shelf for another listen soon, and for many years to come.
Best tracks: Desire, Loner, Haha, Drip Drop, Month, Letter, No Time, Apart
No comments:
Post a Comment