The last album from NE-HI spin-off Dehd was good, as I said in my review last year, but the band's new one is so fully realized that the sound is like that of an entirely new band. Flower of Devotion, out on Fire Talk on Friday, charms entirely, and manages to take the familiar trappings of American indie-rock and twist them into new shapes.
Emily Kempf, Jason Balla, and Eric McGrady are so in command here that a listener is almost shocked at how assured this is. By assured, I don't mean overproduced. What I mean is that the band seems aware that tunes like "Flood", a languid epic mid-way through Flower of Devotion, and the peppier "Loner" occupy the same space. Dehd are playing with some pieces here that one could (if one wanted to) trace back to some obvious points of reference. What's more fun is to simply absorb this and realize how fresh this all sounds.
If "Haha" blends dream-pop with a sensibility that sounds No New York, it works as well as "Letter", a starker electro-pop work-out does. Dehd seem to be drawing from acts as disparate as The Gun Club, Ultra Vivid Scene, The Pixies, and Johnny Thunders in making this, and yet...Flower of Devotion really sounds nothing like any one of those acts. It's only the pieces, the shadings, that make a reviewer reach for those names. It's far easier to sink into the punchy "Nobody" and imagine it's the sound of a Fifties band in a Lynch film, or get lost in the faint rave-up of "Month", a JAMC-circa Automatic-kinda number. Whatever alchemy Dehd have done here, the whole album works spectacularly well. Concise, quietly frenzied in spots, and entirely tuneful throughout, Flower of Devotion is likely this week's best new release.
Flower of Devotion by Dehd is out on Friday via Fire Talk.
More details on Dehd via the band's official website.
[Photo: Alexa Viscius]