LAUGHINGFISH
Album by Black Dresses
Released 20 May 2024
Electro-Industrial
Produced by Black Dresses
Rating – 8/10
Black Dresses’ feelings-heavy goodbye album.
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Like Peaceful as Hell before it, LAUGHINGFISH is the final album by Canadian bedroom experimentalists Black Dresses. There has always been a personal reason behind the duo’s demise, whenever Ada Rook and Devi McCallion have announced they’re calling it a day, but I wish not to rummage through their real life garbage – this is an album review, not a gossip column.
Let’s just say a lot is being left in the past, and album seven reflects on such. Composed of the duo’s typical electro-industrial-glitch-metal-aggrotech, LAUGHINGFISH is a “feelings” album that tries its best to locate the choops in the swamp. As Ada and Devi scream, robo-synthesise, and sing with played-down ability, they bow with waste, isolation, hell and peace, a combination that unthinkably unifies as they go their separate ways.
Black Dresses’ bedroom DAWs are able to map feelings of peace, or at least moods that don’t sound like brains exploding, to combat those that do with a manifesto that reads “let’s lift each other up while we have the chance”. Clearer emotions, sudden soliloquies and transportations from hellscapes to comforting embassies.
Devi begins If You Find Me Gone with quintessentially riddling lyrics – “big sister makes a face like a dog kept in a cage”. Unpeeling like a sad orange, Ada chimes in with “one year to the day since I thought about death as a real thing”, before admitting to not wanting to be alone again. They’ve never been short of honest reflections but these are some of their most honest, and most reflective, even as Devi tears it up with “you say you wanna be saved” amid cracking, distorted instrumentals that still warm with diatonic hope.
Several of these transformations may sound like exaggerations. The theme of the above song actually derives from a pretty horrific story courtesy of Ada, but they’re somehow channelled into a disposition that at least appears relatable. Other exaggerations include the fantastical chorus of I Still See Everything, a synth-laden fake wonderland that is wonderland-esque nevertheless – there are surely bunnies dancing nearby. And as the duo breathe louder than they sing on Can’t Keep the Knots Out, the musicianship of its industrialised afrobeat rhythms and piano intersections prove more important than whatever dumb, lovey stuff they wish to speak.
The duo’s underrated melodicism charters their emotive strengths. The first true melody of the album kicks in around forty seconds into Bad Veggies, the finishing touch being “ohh-ohh” anthemics entirely unexpected at that point in the tracklist. Black Dresses’ tendency to pull uplift out of nowhere is continually charming, particularly when the lyrics said uplift is based around are so personal to the trans experience. Devi keeps it going into Wounded Animal, warming hearts with the swiftly-maturing line “glowing in the sunset, holding hands with an unknown source, like a spectre, like an angel, the light wet spring air is fresh and cold”. It’s the romance of outcasts, blending informally with extroverted chord progressions – a true hunt for unity, one that unravels into blissful crescendo.
Horns honk along Pure Reality, creating ease amid discomfort. A tower of a synth riff beautifies Good Things Happen, surfing the clouds as the world beneath turns to shit. And while synth haven 1-800-The-Moon appears lost in a cybernetic universe, purely weepy, Last Love Song on This Little Planet gives up on doom and gloom – in its aesthetic, at least – to instead frolic through fields with an inspiring, no-worries tempo, and a collection of chords determined by friendship, the latter aspect being akin to tear-inducing finale Silence, with its synths resembling the palettes of 2019’s Love and Affection for Stupid Little Bitches. The album ends with Ada and Devi laughing together, like a right old pair of laughing fish – smile emoji.
The vendetta-driven songs are just as strong. They’re sporadically infused with peace, for example the melodic metal compartments and vrooming synth lullabies of It’s Probably Fine, terrifying one moment, tranquil the next. The World is somehow volatile in its quieter moments, before rebuilding itself with shocking, dystopian synth blocks, as if acknowledging darkness’s necessity. Don’t Forgive the World is an industrial screaming fit with a brief oasis in the chorus. It’s funny; the duo are admonishing the world for all that it’s worth, but I guess there is a sense of love to be taken from that, as they are informing those listening to not take shit, to treat themselves the way they’d like to be treated by the world.
But true dissolution takes over and rattles LAUGHINGFISH similarly to prior Black Dresses albums. A soundtrack-y state of panic washes over Stoopid Dream, as if our two heroes are being chased by zombies or possible wolfmen. Despair is ushered with ease over Devi’s emo melodies on Zero Fantasy – “pure light, x-rays scatter”.
Fanta is a shivering intro, solitary confinement with hallucinated whispers, mirages of the mind portrayed by meticulous post-industrial heartbeats, topped with gothic pianos and synths as fizzy as Fanta. There’s eventually a shred of melody in the vocals, like a quick rainbow amid the nightmare. It contrasts the all-out mutant hustle of No Days Off, eventually bruising with bass drum tremolos while a spring from an old Disney short talks over it. Whatever that spring has to say, it’s Ada with the line of the album – “talk shit like you got shit to say / man, you’re so fucking corny it makes me look straight”.
Feel Something begins with squeaks and ‘90s alt metal riffing. There are blackeyes on Devi’s vocal takes; Ada delivers them to her audience, screaming as if she’s forgotten how to communicate in any other way. It bleeds directly into Cat Cup, which begins with similar riffing before descending into further defeatism; Ada quotes “I can’t do it, I’m too scared, what if people think I’m weird?” as Devi consoles her by saying “you’ll get used to it”, before rapping a number of whacked-off phrases like “chip bag” and “cat cup”, summing up the song’s wild collection of moody overtones, including musical overtones of nu-metal, synthpop, ‘90s underground club music and industrial, whilst supplying heaps of chemistry.
But I will say this: please stop rapping. The album’s hip hop influence thickens too heavily on Magic Eye, with Devi cramming the words “child soldiers in central Florida getting cancelled” into its spoken intro before cheesily talk-rapping while fishing for more chemistry with Ada. Ada’s screams usually cover for anything, but she screams tacky triplet flows on Rotation.
I needed to get those footnotes in there, those anomalies amid the whirlwind of emotions presented by Black Dresses on LAUGHINGFISH. Pummelling their feelings into their music is what the duo have always done best, and so, this is the ultimate goodbye, with no missing pieces across the album’s near-eighty-minute duration, but we’re still guaranteed to want more as those dresses are hung up.
Best tracks – Cat Cup – Wounded Animal – Don’t Forgive the World – If You Find Me Gone – Silence.
Weakest track – Magic Eye.
Rating – 8 out of 10
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