***Today, we seem to have two branches in the school of experimental pop. One branch privileges object-hood, richness of surface, and mass-hallucinatory quotation. The other (much less celebrated) branch seeks to recapture authenticity in the form of a highly personal hallucination of music history. With her sophomore full-length, Lucrecia Dalt follows the latter branch as far as it seems to go. She leaps into a surrealist landscape with stunning abandon, eschewing the comparatively safe tropes and song structures of her previous work. And she charts a surprisingly inventive and rewarding territory in the process. Much as it is with her newfound contemporaries at HEM Berlin, for Dalt, solitude and assemblage (of sound, genre, musicology, technique) is an exploratory zone steered toward the inner universe. To follow the music, one must be prepared to make this trip as real as sound itself. Themes of agitation and disturbance, cumulative, impending and scalable, propel Commotus, and create a framework for understanding its emotional spectra."
MC $11.35
03/25/2022
***"Syzygy begins with a simple provocation enough: 'Are you in a hurry?' But if Lucrecia Dalt intends to provoke, then her invitation leads to a radically unexpected denouement. For Dalt does, indeed, lead us. But where she leads us is to a kind of Ursprung of beautiful distress. Syzygy is a notion which Dalt poetically amplifies by giving emotional depth to the astrophysical concept of a point of conjunction and opposition. No place is this, and no whole thing can exist here. In contrast to her contemporaries, Dalt's second opus sees her become more the Charon than the chanteuse, reminding us that complicatedness, dialectic, and radical alterity are what really forged the axle of creation. For Dalt, Syzygy is a state of eternal oscillation that effervesces from the sand and levitates like a mirage."
MC $11.35
03/25/2022