Dadamah - This is Not A Dream

Best of 2020

More Kiwi gold from Grapefruit (formerly Peter Jefferies, Garbage and the Flowers) in the shape of this utterly essential Dadamah retrospective. Comprising everything the band ever released, including the incredible posthumous single for Yellow Electric (Grouper's label) in 2012, This Is Not a House is truly definitive. And not before time. Until now these songs have been difficult to locate, expensive enough on CD, near-prohibitive on vinyl. I do wonder why. Slo-mo, deeply romantic art-damaged rock n roll that inverts the classic form without losing its desire for transcendence. Spiritually aligned with Patti and the Velvets of course (who wouldn't want that?), but uniquely shaped into oblique, frayed and fried stream of conscious-like structures. Roy Montgomery's (he of Pin Group fame) guitar playing is a big part of this, a master of tension and release in and of itself, but when combined with Kim Pieter's primal intonations, you're talking true elevation. And High Tension House still stands as one of the songs of that era, a bad dream love song to who knows who, on par with Garbage and the Flowers' Love Comes Slowly. Art(rock) with a great big wailing heart.