We’ve written about New York-based band Dicktations twice already, enjoying their debut H*ckhound, which we described as “The Replacements, Black Lips, Weezer and God knows who else [forced] into a blender and set… in bone-shaped jelly moulds”, as well as the follow up Words Don’t Love You, which sounded “something like The Strokes playing in your garage”.
Led by Miguel Gallego, the band are back with a new twenty-song album which charts a time of great change in their lives, the process beginning just before they graduated from college and seeing them through a series of moves. The record became what Gallego describes as “an index of a weird time in our lives”. The ‘weird’ is summed up by his spell in a place called Edgewater, just across the Hudson from Upper Manhattan, where wild parrots scream from the electric poles (no, really) and high rise buildings cause what the New York Times has called a “collective psychic depression” (FYI – by blocking out the sun and effectively causing it to set an hour too early). Perhaps unsurprisingly, such a place led to contemplation of the existential variety:
I spent a lot of time ruminating, that summer… I couldn’t shake the feeling that my future was preordained by my past. I worried about whether or not there was more to a person than what happens to them, what has happened to them, what is happening to them, what will happen to them. If every tense collapsed, would what remains just be a passive accumulation of happenings?
This feels critical to both the length of Super Paradise and the variation seen across its run-time, with style, mood and genre switching from song to song. Opener ‘Dicktations Forever’ finds bright instrumentation supporting a spoken word ramble, the narrator talking as if finally free or able to be honest and open, while ‘When My Bro’s Not Home’ is a brash singalong rock song, like the product of some bar band too blue to move on and too drunk to care. ‘Temporary’ is Titus-esque punk rock, ‘I Devour The Party’ a Pavement-style jam and ‘Parrot Town’ a slow, piano-led croon which plays like a rainy birthday bash to which no guests turned up.
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However, Dicktations are here to prove that even the most tragic, miserable scenes can and will be followed by something different, that just because the sun sets artificially early one day does not mean it will not rise the next. ‘Comala’ might not be happier but at least packs more energy, while ‘Dogs w/o Angst’ feels like blood returning to a frozen body, the guitars in the latter half a celebration of nothing more than the joy of being able to make noise with your friends. From here, ‘Adult Colouring Book’ emerges with new-found pep, and ‘Witch Hazel’ bounces along as if newly free from some heavy weight.
This isn’t to say there’s some snap change for the better. ‘Teen Bedrooms II’ is a lonely ambient track that mimics the strange sensation of keeping your own company too long, ‘Standing in Line’ a bummed-out love song, and ‘( i’m) hot bloodéd’ manages to sound both down and chipper at the same time, like the thoughts of a person so used to feeling low that the take-off and landing around such bouts arrive with a wry humour. However, for all the woe and doubt, the record never deviates from its primary message – each and every moment is a law unto itself, be sure to live in it and for it because, be it good or bad, it will not last forever. ‘Heather’ closes the release with this quiet reassurance, starting off slow and sad before spiking into life around the halfway mark, as if the narrator, realising what he is trying to say, is demonstrating the wisdom in real time, rising from the gloom with new found vitality.
“Everyone we’ve yet to love will never,
never see this sadness as a mark
or a way to live forever”
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Once the album finishes, it’s worth spinning right back through to the opening track again, the conversational spoken word calm and clear and casual, the instrumentation upbeat and joyous, pure optimism swirling into cathartic noise. “I think it’s a record about coming to terms with the past’s inevitable presence in the present,” Gallego explains, “and trying to seek agency in every day life. It’s about trying to answer the question above—feeling the shape of “no” form on the tip of your tongue.”
No indeed. Dicktations Forever.
Super Paradise is out now and you can get it from the Dicktations Bandcamp page.