AEM053 My Dearest Darling

When I heard My Dear­est Dar­ling for the first time my ini­tial reac­tion was, “wait, what just hap­pened?” My sec­ond thought, after sup­press­ing the acid flash­backs was, “that’s some trippy shit.” And my third impulse was to con­tact them about doing a fea­ture in The Ampeater Review.

My Dear­est Dar­ling cer­tainly is some trippy shit, but not in a clichéd “oh my god I just swal­lowed so many magic mush­rooms” way… inso­far as it’s rea­son­able to believe that any band hail­ing from Burling­ton Ver­mont could not have been inspired, at least to some extent, by trip­ping balls.  This band is sur­pris­ingly artic­u­late and I cant shake the sen­sa­tion that some deep seeded truth lies at the core of the cacoph­ony.  For some­one who gen­er­ally prefers a sub­tlety in music, I find myself unusu­ally taken by My Dear­est Dar­ling, whose over-saturated sound mir­rors so beau­ti­fully the chaotic bus­tle of the human mind.

My Dear­est Dar­ling began a few years back when keyboardist/vocalist D. Mun­z­ing wrote a ‘suite’ of exper­i­men­tal pop songs on a beat up piano deep within the Ver­mont Woods. Even­tu­ally Mun­z­ing emerged from the woods to share his music with gui­tarist M. Hagan and bassist T. Gevry, both for­mer mem­bers of the Burlington-based Lend­away, and drum­mer C. Math­ieu, with whom Mun­z­ing had pre­vi­ously played along­side in the band Tell No One.  Within a few months Munzing’s songs had been trans­formed into space age psy­che­delic pop hits and the group had coa­lesced into My Dear­est Dar­ling.  A slew of shows in Ver­mont and NYC open­ing for bands such as White Rab­bits and The Fiery Fur­naces earned My Dear­est Dar­ling a small fol­low­ing and before long they were hard at work on their first album.  The LP, self titled, was recorded over the span of sev­eral months in base­ments, mul­ti­ple stu­dios, and ulti­mately in Munzing’s bed­room.  Mun­z­ing explains that “even though fin­ish­ing the record myself took longer than I antic­i­pated, record­ing on my own allowed me to exper­i­ment with­out any time or finan­cial restric­tions and I was able to get closer to the sound I was look­ing for.” The prod­uct of these ses­sions was  finally released in Decem­ber of 2009 and can be down­loaded at www.mydearestdarling.com.  Key­boardist Z. Gun­der­son has joined the band to “take over synth duties for live shows” and My Dear­est Dar­ling is plot­ting to take the North East by storm in the Spring of 2010.

My Dear­est Dar­ling is the­atri­cal in a way rem­i­nis­cent of Radio­head or Muse.  A-Side “The Per­fect Vice” is a dizzy­ing vor­tex of a song.  An 88-key piano roll grabs your atten­tion from the get-go and pulls you into a haze of war­bling synths and fren­zied drums.  A relent­lessly fast 6/8 feel pulses through­out the song from start to fin­ish, mesh­ing aston­ish­ingly well with Munzing’s slow but deter­mined vocals which float sto­ically over the chaos.  His voice is appro­pri­ately breathy on the lows but on the high notes takes on a sense of apoc­a­lyp­tic urgency.  The song’s got enough hooks within its verse/chorus struc­ture to keep the lis­tener cap­ti­vated for its longevity.  Nev­er­the­less, the break­down at about 2:45 pro­vides refresh­ing respite from the unkempt chaos and gives each instru­ment a lit­tle time to shine.  First the drums get their moment, blast­ing their way through a few resid­ual piano notes with a tribal tom-tom beat.  One by one, the band jumps back in.  Gevry’s ascend­ing bass line, which anchors the song down, floats to the   front of the mix before a syn­co­pated piano riff is lay­ered on top of it.  Synths and gui­tars fol­low en suite and, at last, the chorus.

B-Side “Decay” is more ethe­real, lack­ing the in-your-face frenzy of “The Per­fect Vice.” As Mun­z­ing com­i­cally phrases it, “its a slow burner but reward­ing assum­ing the lis­tener has the patience to not hit ‘next’ even after the song is inter­rupted on their iPhone by their mom ask­ing, ‘do you have enough sweaters for win­ter this year?’” Actu­ally, my first lis­ten was inter­rupted not by my mother but by my com­puter, beep­ing to warn me that my bat­tery level was crit­i­cally low.  Obe­di­ently, I pow­ered down, but as soon as I found an out­let, I was ready for another lis­ten.  In a strange way “Decay” was already stuck in my head and yet I couldn’t even me remem­ber how it went.   All I knew as that I had to hear the rest of the song.  I returned to it with an an acute sense of of déjà vu or, bet­ter yet, déjà écouté, but with no con­scious mem­ory of what I was hear­ing.  I sup­pose what I’m try­ing to say is that “Decay” is not a catchy song by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion but it’s com­pletely immer­sive. Arpeg­giat­ing syn­the­siz­ers cas­cade through each ear evok­ing vin­tage Pink Floyd.  A ten­sion per­vades through­out the song, even in the soft­est sec­tions..  Sure it’s chill but that’s is not due to a lack of energy but stems from a sup­pressed energy t hat is con­stantly on the verge of burst­ing free.  And in the gui­tar solo, it finally does.  “Decay” ends on the high note of the gui­tar solo and fiz­zles away, like an explod­ing super­nova dis­si­pat­ing into space.

Nate Green­berg

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