#dadamah

from dadamah’s 1995 compilation on kranky, this is not a dream, originally released on the 1992 LP of the same name.

This was released by Grapefruit Records.  Let me use this occasion to remind you that Grapefruit is having an amazing sale right now.  Noah Sterba, The Terminals, Roy Montgomery, and The Garbage and The Flowers can all be had at steep discounts (sometimes as high as 80%).

Dadamah - Limbo Swing

The shared experience of cloistered living led us to this moment. We stand upon the precipice of delight, with no notions of shape or sender, only an expectation crafted from an unmentionable past. Swearing we wouldn’t betray ourselves like this hasn’t gotten us anywhere ( it never does). everything will get ahead of us as soon as we start fancying for this that and the other. “Remember the last time?”, she utters with an agency greater than herself. “We built up this big picture, made all that racket about changing our lives up, and look…” sweeping hand gesture [I appear to be listening, focusing instead on a picture of somewhere I’d never known. A place explored and experienced when this meant nothing. Where were we back then? I can’t for the life of me say with certainty. But now…this is what’s left to be dealt with. Earning a living in order to understand, there’s something inherently wrong here. Whoever wrote this script was taking back door payments. Neither of us believe the lines given to us, nor is our faith with those who want chaos with no contingency plan.]    “Hello?!” hand comes into frame stage left, makes contact with cheek “How long have I been talking to myself for?” [look at her, apologize, tell her to continue] “You know, for all your theories you sure are useless sometimes.”

Dadamah - Papa Doc

“ High Tension House”, Dadamah

The importance and depth/body of work of Christchurch, NZ's Roy Montgomery is too long for me to get into here, and probably redundant for a lot of you, but the gap between his '90s works and the spate of releases from 2016 on (dutifully documented by Omaha's Grapefruit label) feels nearly closed now, and in 2024 it's all had time for new chasms to open around it. (If you're mistaking him for the character from TV's Castle, put down the remote and go outside). Other works of recent years have been dedicated to Montgomery's longtime partner Kerry McCarthy's passing back in 2021, but Broken Heart Surgery really feels like the effort where the grief has settled in his bones, some of the acoustic crispness of more recent releases like Rhymes of Chance muted down into mournful low clouds of chorus pedal chords and the haunting vocals of longtime compatriots and collaborators like Stephen Cogle (Terminals, Victor Dimisch Band, Vacuum; essentially the other lynchpin of New Zealand's modern music) and Garbage and the Flowers vocalist Emma Johnstone. Barricaded in by gentle vocal reveries, haunted poetry and atmospheric synths, this one feels colder and slower, yet more immediate than some of his other works, looking back to his '90s touchstones Scenes from the South Island and the soon-to-be-reissued Temple IV, as well as the massive RMHQ box set, as milemarkers in his astonishing career. Words like "goth" don't even begin to set the stage for the desolation and ultimate rebirth that takes place across these six tracks, and I find myself at a loss for an audience who needs to discover this and won't feel it within their bones, forever attached. Unlike the Grapefruit titles this one's a Swedish import and will not hang out for long. Absolutely essential, the first true stunner of 2024. (Doug Mosurock)