Recording in a studio, the Chicago DIY trio sound newly airy and lush, but no less direct and sincere. Their confidence in their concision is the best part.
One night last summer, at a 19th-century opera house, Dehd were playing in the middle of the room. Headlining a label showcase configured for 360-degree views, the bleeding-hearted indie-rock trio followed their steelier, more poker-faced peers Patio and Deeper. As the latter finished their set, all three bands convened for a cover of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” on which Dehd guitarist Jason Balla and bassist Emily Kempf took the mics with their typical on-stage abandon. That night—eye-to-eye with their listeners, hiding no side of themselves, and taking cues from Robert Smith by bending the rigid edges of post-punk with the brightness and zeal of pop—Dehd were exactly in their element.
This direct connection carries through Flower of Devotion, the band’s biggest-sounding album yet. Rather than hooking your attention with mystery, Dehd look you straight in the eye, sing you something discomfitingly simple and sincere, and dare you not to look at the floor. Kempf comes out of the gate screaming, “Baby, I love ya/Always thinking of ya,” and ends the album with, “If this is all that we get, so be it/It was worth it to know you exist.” Though it was finished before 2020 came to be defined by immense loss, Flower of Devotion makes the case for reaching out and being direct with the people who should hear it, while the opportunity exists.
Flower of Devotion’s sound is tightly tailored to its lyrics, but in a different way than the band’s previous album was. Water, which was self-recorded, sounded thin and tinny, a raw sonic quality amplified by the rawness of Balla and Kempf singing about how they had literally just broken up. But Flower of Devotion, recorded in a studio, goes in on saturation, dialing up reverb and echo effects and adding touches of synth and tambourine to their minimal set-up. It’s lush and inviting end-to-end, even as it gets uncomfortably close. These ringing, sustained sounds agree with the two singers’ fondness for squeezing every drop out of a single word. Kempf’s warbling, exaggerated “bay-ey-BAY” at the tipping point of “Letter” says more than any carefully worded text message could.
That moment is one of a few that sound almost straight from the songbook of Roy Orbison, one of Flower of Devotion’s key influences. Orbison—whose cover art for his own third LP might be referenced here, but whose knack for articulating yearning with efficient pop verses and potent vibrato definitely is—may as well be Dehd’s patron saint of heartache. “Loner,” for instance, feels at first like something of a spiritual cousin to “Only the Lonely.” But Orbison’s standard was an ode to heartbreak’s dubious consolation prize: the self-righteous comfort of belonging to a club. When Kempf sings about wanting “nothing more than to be a loner,” it’s an embrace of loneliness’s inevitability and the limitations of partnership—an affirmation of desire, but especially of desire to be comfortably alone. Her voice cracks upward when she holds the word “loner,” like a lone wolf howling at the moon, like Orbison when he was crying over you.
Kempf’s singing voice has steadily gotten stronger and more versatile with every Dehd release, and here it’s a flat-out force. She adapts it a dozen different ways to sell a feeling: a cautioning bellow when singing about being protective of her ex on “Letter”; a deteriorating tremble to grieve that “the house is burning, while I sit here drowning” on “Flood”; yelping and screeching and tongue-clicking when that’s just what feels fitting. It’s Flower of Devotion’s primary instrument, alongside Balla’s newly airy guitar. Whether soloing or providing counterpoint to the vocal melodies, Balla picks which notes to play like he’s picking vegetables from the produce section: selectively but without overthinking it, not opposed to a bruise or dent if the size and color are right, and if he touches it, he commits to it.
At first blush, Flower of Devotion can feel like it’s missing something. There’s a nagging instinct that pop songs are supposed to have more pieces to them, or that drummer Eric McGrady is supposed to be using more than half of a drum set. Stick with it, though, and something even better emerges from those gaps. By leaving their songs exposed, Dehd show how much they believe in them, and rightfully so. Their confidence in their concision is the best part. You can hear it when they observe the simple passage of time, when Balla sings about a calendar page’s impermanence on “Month” or when McGrady notices grey hairs and fading memory on “Apart”—his first song written and sung for the band. You can hear it when they ask a question, looking right at you: Why do you hide? Do you want to disappear? Is this living? Flower of Devotion generously rewards not looking away.
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