Dick Texas - All That Fall LP

Something like Dick Texas is increasingly rare in the creative landscape of late-stage capitalism; music that’s mysterious, enthralling, unnerving, and authentically strange without making any obvious choices or hitting any predictable notes. Begun as the solo project of Detroit artist Valerie Salerno, Dick Texas defies logic and expectations, reveling in experimentalism and unglamourous weirdness, but never losing sight of the songcraft, emotions, or intentions that co-exist uncomfortably alongside the noise. Debut album All That Fall draws an indecipherable roadmap of Salerno’s inspirations and calamities, smearing dusky Southwestern atmospheres into dehydrated, bit-crushed rage and ungovernable, structure-averse monoliths that get their foot in the door by disguising themselves at first as lonely campfire songs. It’s not an album of hit singles or easy conceptual throughlines, but one of abandoned gas stations, sun-dried bones, jarring blasts of ghost harmonica on cemetery radio stations, and raw feelings of grief and remorse viewed through a microscope in a recurring dream. All That Fall establishes just how little the music Dick Texas is making is like anything else. Salerno got her start in Sojii, a churning noise-rock band that regularly executed rigorous d.i.y. tours and recorded their only album with Albini. In 2019, Salerno quietly began writing solo songs under the Dick Texas banner after she lost two of her closest friends in quick succession. The project served both as a way to express the grief of this horrific loss, but also provided a place where these heavy feelings could be processed as clearly discernible lyrics instead of anguished screams buried beneath volume and torque in Sojii. Over the next several surreal and slow-moving years, Dick Texas gradually came into form. In 2021, Salerno began releasing songs she performed and recorded herself and enlisted the help of Adis Kaltak for production, mixing and mastering. These included original singles “Flies'' and “Acrid,” as well as a cover of John Cale’s “Thoughtless Kind.” After getting this early material into the collective consciousness, she assembled a full band to play her songs live, and entered Detroit studio High Bias to track the album with engineers Kate Derringer and Cam Frank. Production on the album wrapped up in 2023 while the group gained momentum through their shows and the release of remixes by Detroit DJ Tammy Lakkis and Austin-based industrial noise heathens Blank Hellscape. All That Fall completely realizes the loose threads that first emerged as the project was incubating. Fully-produced, collaboratively-performed renderings of previously released demo-like versions of “Flies” and “Acrid” elevate the songs to new levels, with a better view of the jagged grief and broken-glass synthesizer sheen that was blurry and distant in the solo takes. There’s a new urgency in the upped tempos played on live drums, and an inherent anxiety to the arrangements, even when they gallop along with traditional cowboy song simplicity. Opener “Long Dirt Driveway” sets the scene with a lengthy, formless intro that bleeds into a slouching, desert-hued space blues dirge that’s almost threatening in its calm. Throughout the album, we’re bracing for the worst, a horror movie waiting to happen in the form of tunes that sound like an alternate world where Scott Walker produced all the Mazzy Star albums or Spacemen 3 came to in off-grid Arizona and just started walking west. The singularity Salerno finds on All That Fall extends beyond just the album’s sound. Songs about death and disenchantment usually assume intense, cathartic character, communicating sorrow through clenched teeth and bloodied hands. These songs choose a separate path, approaching even the darkest experiences with an open-hearted curiosity that’s metered and sometimes even feels playful. It’s a capsule of impossibly-paired feelings, ideas, signifiers, and elements that works perfectly without explaining itself, much like the way a dream makes sense only while you’re dreaming it. A peculiar, immersive world blooms as these seven songs play out. A world that’s somehow simultaneously dangerous and tender at every angle, and one where no turn leads to the expected.