music moots with Dim Wizard ("Darkness" by Katie Dey)
We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask someone to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.
Today we have Dim Wizard! That would be the musical identity of David Combs, who played in the recently disbanded Washington D.C.-based power pop band Bad Moves; Dim Wizard is a collaborative project that has hosted artists like Ratboys and Mike Krol as past participants. I actually wrote about "Ride The Lightning," the Dim Wizard tune featuring Jeff Rosenstock, Illuminati Hotties and Superviolet, in the Listening To Your Favorite Songs of 2023 , so it's cool to 'close the loop' on Dim Wizard coverage straight from the source.
Molly Mary O’Brien
The newest freshest Dim Wizard single is a collab with Australian musician Katie Dey, an alt-pop delicacy called "Stoicism."
jeremywayme
What a fabulously constructed song!! Off-kilter rhythm, manipulated vocals that sound like melted candle wax, all building to a hectic and cathartic finish, with drums so frenetic they practically vibrate. Not to get all synesthetic on you but the simple vocal melody paired with the multifaceted production reminds me of, like...convex...polyhedra? Elaborate but self-contained, complicated but still simple.
Also the syncopated string-like synths made me realize how much I miss a certain type of Formal R&B production that I feel has fallen off. Lauryn Hill "Everything Is Everything," Mary J. Blige "Family Affair"...shit, you could throw in 50 Cent "In da Club" in there. We used to get a little orchestral with it...
David recommended another Katie Dey song for his Music Moots choice—"Darkness." "I love all her records but that track kicked off her 2020 record Mydata, and since then it's made its way into my top 5 songs of all time, right next to New Order and the Supremes and Dwight Twilley Band," he wrote. "It just has that timeless melancholy melody over an uptempo beat thing going, which is basically my favorite thing."
First, it just warms my heart that David collab'd with someone who has made one of his top 5 songs of all time. Second, yes to the melancholy melody over uptempo beat thing, there is an undeniably Rightness to the way the repetition of both vocals and track fit into each other just so. Geometry strikes again.
Third, I wanna think about the lyrics, which describe a feeling of love for someone else as wanting to become specialized technology, to subsume space and time. I wanna be a smart phone with the / Face detection, fingerprint scanner / I wanna be the black hole that'll / Tear us into darkness.
"Is this love?" is a popular question to ask in a song. Bob Marley asked that question, as did Whitesnake and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. And I think a good answer to that question is, do you feel like the singer of "Darkness"? Because there is something about love that makes you want to manipulate reality, to fight against the laws of physics. For me, for example, this kind of notion happens when someone I love is in pain in some way, and my initial thought is that I want to remove that pain from them. This kind of thought is irrational—pain is not a Thing, it can't be ejected like a USB drive—but the irrationality is proof of the scale of the love. Love is quantum cosmology, love has me questioning the behavior of subatomic particles and shit. Maybe they could be arranged in a new way, if I expressed my strong feelings well enough.
Also before we close out just wanted to highlight the single art for "Stoicism," which rocks:
Thank you David! Listen to Dim Wizard please, and check out the link aggregation.
And thanks for reading I Enjoy Music! If you like it, tell a friend.
