Forget Your Own Face (studio album) by Black Dresses

Forget Your Own Face brings out the extremes in Black Dresses' music. The duo have, for some time now, been able to merge brutal noise and dreamy off-kilter pop not just into the same albums but into the same songs and these elements, with the addition of some hip hop influences, are distilled and then arranged together in more stark contrast than ever. 'Let's Be' stands out as the key example of this, there's one moment where Rook's screamed vocals are cut short and within a second Devi is singing over dreamy synths. I don't know who else could pull this off. The project also sees Rook and Devi push their vocals to totally new places, allowing for wild shifts in the tone of the songs. It's been fascinating seeing this evolution rub off on Rook's solo work in particular, most of her material these days wouldn't have seemed possible before she formed Black Dresses with Devi, whose work before that point wasn't particularly heavy either. Amongst the chaos in the tracklist there are moments where you can take a breath and just take in what's happening. These can be brief sections of songs, particular lines or whole tracks, like on 'doomspiral' which feels like a bedroom pop song but contains too many of Black Dresses' quirks to ever seem normal. As on previous releases, the duo's sincerity is at the centre of everything that works. Lyrics and wild instrumentation that might seem overblown on other releases are kept in the context of an unfiltered expression of self. It also allows simpler lines to carry their full emotional weight. This all comes together on the final track 'nightwish', where apocalyptic visions of the future "stars shooting overhead as everything in the world falls apart", are concluded with a line like "let's just still try to have fun".

From Arthurknight 05/20/2022 00:10

This hits. Forever In Your Heart was a more ambitious follow up to Peaceful as Hell, but this new album is so much more a proper development of what made Peaceful the kind of impactful name making record it was. Loud headphone listeners beware, I may have developed tinnitus.