Devi McCallion & Katie Dey: Magic Fire Brain

- One day soon I’m going to have to stop looking at new music through the lens of the special horror that is 2020. Not because the year'll be over (please, let it be over), not because it’s not accurate anymore, but just because it’s so bleeding obvious can we talk about something else already? Today, however, is not that day. Devi McCallion of the recently defunct Black Dresses and Australia’s own Katie Dey are confronted by the same wasteland as the rest of us, perhaps more so, but for them it’s not barren, it’s a vista of shared, musical strength and possibility.

Why is this? To begin with, isolation doesn't have the same deathlike grip on them: they’re both adeptly attuned to an existence in the online realm. Dey, always a bit of a ghost in the physical, released her last record My Data only a couple of months ago and made specific note of how it celebrated an online relationship, one that can be “precisely as meaningful as a relationship that's physical”. McCallion’s experience shares some of these qualities: a great amount of her work with Ada Rook in Black Dresses was done over the internet, sans physical interaction.

The claustrophobia-induced soul searching and distress that has characterised many of the lockdown releases this year is also the bread and butter of Dey and McCallion. Dey has spent years investigating the fraught space of her personal identity, mediated by chronic pain and medication, through a splintered mask of distorted pop. McCallion, on the other hand, has explored similar territory while at the same time waging an only partially seen war against political reactionaries, cyber-persecution and -latterly- obsessive, stalker-ish fans. Her persona messily and unapologetically pushes aside any objections in the search for its own space and hasn’t ever shied away from a fight, relentlessly baiting a world full of throwbacks and religious bigots with the flagrantly provocative lyrics you’ll find in Black Dresses back-catalogue. In both cases it’s easy to imagine how these pressure-cooker existences would have both prepared these two for our present moment, at the same time as being, to a degree, a living hell.

Black Dresses imploded under that pressure, earlier this year, shortly after releasing their final album, Peaceful As Hell, citing the ‘fans’ as the straw which broke the camel’s back. Now, despite this and though both Dey and McCallion have already done more this year than most artists have managed, they’re not letting fandom, exhaustion or isolation get in the way of releasing more music. At the same time as they're building on the foundations of their first collaboration, Some New Form Of Life, released back in 2018, they're taking advantage of their adaptation to the contemporary situation with their new album, Magic Fire Brain,

I am both surprised and not-at-all surprised at how well the pair mesh, artistically. I don’t mean that so much in terms of genre: Dey’s bizarre but sweet avant-garde pop has some teasing, distorted and twee connections to McCallion’s bombastic electro-industrial noise, but it sometimes feels, not that they don’t contrast well, but that you get the sweet one or the crashing other. Lyrically, however, they’re often like the same soul. With a certain regularity I couldn’t tell you who wrote which lyric. That extends to the performance, as both artists use voice altering electronics and while you can usually pick Devi’s low drawl, versus Katie’s cracked soprano, that isn’t always the case.

Sometimes it’s like two girlfriends coming together for a drunken night of home karaoke, yelling off-key at life’s woes. Some tracts clearly belong to one or another, like the intimate descriptions of Dey’s pain, or -cribbed from the track Soda- this piece of signature Christian trolling by McCallion: “just / having a wishful dream about a future / that i never could’ve asked for anyway / i flew above hell carrying christ’s cross / he asked me to hold it up for him and the lights shone off / and the people all burning in hell were like “what the fuck” / and i was like i dunno / im just like doing what that guy told me to and its just / yknow / god works in mysterious ways / you ever hear that shit? / people say it sometimes.” Almost Trumpian in its meandering (although thoroughly subversive) obscenity, it gave me a real grin. At other times the duets seem to melt into each other and the swirling themes of pain, suffering, self-destruction, personal growth, love and wonder are shared completely. You might even say they're old hands at this and that the present nightmare-scape is just more grist for the mill, but it's impressive that the pair consistently distill, from all the trauma, a kind of heroic joy.

I keep promising to stop talking about this year, but it’s tough, isn't it? We all have to pick our way through the difficult terrain, find a path through. The Magic Fire Brain which Devi McCallion and Katie Dey partner in was created to help themselves, a personal journal and their own map through the minefield; I’m glad they’ve released it to the world though. Their recollection of existing in hell can also be like an oxygen mask dropping from the overhead compartment. At a time where many of us need a little help, sharing in this experience, even a little bit, feels like a balm.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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