Dearling Physique Pushes Pop Forward With Deadeye Dealer

Dearling Physique’s Deadeye Dealer is just so unusual. It’s an ambitious and intellectually challenging album that you won’t want to end. It’s chameleon-like, with disparate influences, and yet it is more coherent than most collections of songs crammed into an album format. Its contradictions unify it. In short, it’s the kind of album that signals the arrival of a new iconoclastic voice in pop.

On Deadeye Dealer, the electronic quartet led by writer and performance artist Domino Davis, successfully fuses modern R&B with recent-vintage synthpop and quite a lot of industrial noise. The vibe is both intimate and operatic, something like experimental theatre or an avant garde film score. Davis sings with a diva’s mixture of vulnerability and power, not unlike Antony of Antony and the Johnsons.

Davis’s original vision inspires highly improbable comparisons. Try to imagine Toni Braxton fronting Nine Inch Nails. Or picture Prince and Joy Division collaborating on some Bertolt Brecht covers with production by Matmos. “Discipline Your Hands,” the first single and final track on the album, sounds like a place Radiohead might have arrived at had they ever worked with Erasure.

That should give you some idea of what to expect but it also makes the album sound uneven, which it isn’t. It is full of surprises and musical leaps of faith that make each song feel like a natural progression from the one that preceded it. But, despite risks taken and boundaries collapsed, Dearling Physique’s first full-length is an elegant album that doesn’t sound like an experiment at all. It actually has a monochromatic quality — all soft grays and dark shadows like the album art. And somehow the industrial influence and drops of dissonance still allow for luxurious textures that feel like lace and satin against the ears.

Hopefully, this debut will turn out to be as delightfully disruptive to the music scene as it deserves to be. (With its noir palette, Deadeye Dealer could easily sneak into playlists next to neo darkwave kids like Salem or Kordan.) And, hopefully, the next Dearling Physique album will come soon, and be even more daring and just as lovely.

Photo Courtesy of Dearling Physique

Featured image courtesy of Dearling Physique.