You Can Be My Wave

Digital hardcore duo Black Dresses pushed sonic boundaries with their latest album Forever In Your Heart released earlier this year and it's packed full of millennial doom and gloom. Track after track I am subjected to hearing about how the world is a dumpster fire and Black Dresses offer no reconciliation. The tone on Forever In Your Heart is defeatist and bleak. The music is just as oppressive with its distorted guitars, metallic percussion, harsh digital edits, piercing synths, and the vocal assaults from both Ada Rook and Demi McCallion. Now this all sounds really negative but I promise there are redeeming qualities in this record. For one, the vocal chemistry between Rook and McCallion is wonderful. McCallion's approach is much more unhinged, often singing very out of tune and screaming in a way that feels incredibly unhealthy. On the other hand we have Rook whose vocals feel much more refined. Her sung phrases are often accompanied with some tasteful auto-tune and her screams, while absolutely blood curdling, demonstrate a lot of technique making them somewhat of a joy to hear when she unexpectedly pulls it out. I feel like one couldn't work without the other as the two provide that balance of tension and release.

As aggressive as the music is, Black Dresses knows how to write a hell of a melodic hook. Some of my favourite songs, Heaven, Waiting42moro, and Gone In an Instant for example, all have these joyously sweet moments. Heaven in particular unexpectedly transitions from this narrow and glitchy section into an expansive and blissful moment propelled by Rook's harmonized vocals. Gone In an Instant has a similar stark contrast between its sections. The instrumentation in the verses feel kinda cavernous with swelling guitars and minimal percussion, but McCallion's soft, dejected vocals feel claustrophobically close. The chorus once again expands with sunburnt guitars and metallic industrial drums. Rook takes over vocal duties and alternates between incredibly angelic singing and her trademark shrieks.

There are also a few experimental head-scratchers on the record that are quite interesting. Bulldozer feels like a bit of Nine Inch Nails worship with how dark and ominous the music is as McCallion whispers perplexing lines like "Pussy like a bulldozer." There's also some abrupt digital edits (and an actual explosion) that interrupt the song at points creating even more chaos and confusion. It's totally unsettling. Mistake reads as a stream of consciousness monologue about how we as kids are just trying to find our place in the world and how everyone wants to impose their beliefs and expectations on us in a self-serving manner. These experiences can later be revealed to be quite painful as we sometimes have to undo the conditioning we've gone through in order to forge our own path. It is perhaps the least compelling track musically, but I think the sentiment of the song is very interesting and important.

Another track that I think all members of my generation can get behind is the song We'll Figure It Out. In a very coy, 'everything is fine' tone, McCallion sings about how every generation has passed on the responsibility of fixing the climate crisis. The problems have become so compounded that young people today are starting to feel like the climate crisis is insurmountable and that we are essentially 'in a trap.' The messaging is blunt and without a lick of nuance but we've gone so long without any action from those in power that I guess we need to spell it out for them. Oddly enough, this track is the most danceable track. It almost reminds me of something The Kills might do if they made more aggressive and metallic dance punk.

Towards the end, there were a stretch of tracks that I did find hard to appreciate. So much aggression and noise with very little in the way of any hooks to hold on to. However, I came away with this really impressed. Sonically, it was very interesting, attention demanding, and there were quite a few musical detours in sound that kept it from sounding like just a pile of noise. While I don't particularly pay too much attention to lyrics that much, I feel like the lyrical approach to each song was focused and poignant, adding another depth to the record that I typically don't explore. Black Dresses were supposedly broken up so it is unexpected that this record even came to fruition, but I'm really glad they decided to continue making and releasing music.