The Dacios first erupted on local stages in 2005. Featuring members of legendary Melbourne acts Little Ugly Girls, Magic Dirt, Useless Children and Grey Daturas, the band is known for their entertainingly energetic and hypnotic performances.
The new album ‘To The End’ is a vividly cathartic ride into the poetics of joy, loss, pain and simmering rage. From the opening whipcrack wipeout beat of ‘Dark Dark Light’, guitars are deployed like flame throwers and air raid sirens. Always there is heartbeat repetition, the quickened pulse of the elliptical bass lines, the drive to oblivion, the escape from memory. Focussed stabs of noise and lyricism. Intensely alive, no one is backing down here. No surrender. The urge to move ahead. Lose oneself in speed, propulsion and rant.
Ardently articulate punk poet Linda J surgically dissects shattered dreams of domesticity, prompted by the dissolution of a marriage. There is no room for trite clichés. Every word is a precisely aimed uppercut, every line a bruising blow to the heart.
But ‘To The End’ is so much more. This album makes you fall in love with language, with the clarity of razor-sharp insights. Breathless, you are left gasping for air, because the stream of words keeps coming. The brain keeps humming with poetry, while the music keeps churning, burning, scorching the synapses.
Conceived and executed in the hothouse claustrophobia of Covid lockdown, this is proof that it is necessary to have time on one’s hand to hone articulation, to truly create. There is a bolshy attitude to Linda J’s art. The earned right to take and not just to give. Hers is a world where words matter, as tools for self-construction and deconstruction of illusion. Acting as a mirror and a vehicle for her fury, the instruments unleash a howling vortex of sound that is gloriously impolite. No filters, no apologies.
By the end we have circled to the beginning. Life born out of chaos, but everything willed to be exactly as it is. This is The Dacios’ truth.
To The End is out now on digital and a limited edition of 300 heavyweight 12” clear vinyl LP featuring cover art by L. J. Dacio.