Dilly Dally’s debut LP “Sore” was released on 10/09 via Buzz and our buds at Partisan Records!From their debut album “Sore” comes the lead single “Desire” via Buzz Records and Partisan Records.
This blunt-force grunge album from Toronto’s Dilly Dally is more than a 90s throw-back. In fact, it strips the plastic wrap off of everything trendy about the 90s revival and reminds you what made grunge rock so good in the first place, and that’s pure, unadulterated angst. Even the screeching feedback that kicks off the record is no match for the fiery, deep-seated roar of new-comer Katie Monks: Her apathy is boiling and she’s a kettle to the mic. But it’s not just the sound of Monks’ voice or the piercing guitars that make Sore feel so raw. The lyrics grate at Monks’ vexed desires with verses like “I miss you, the ballin’ chain.” Every song on Dilly Dally’s powerful debut—starting with the explosive lead single “Desire” to the aforementioned “Ballin Chain”—scrapes against loving what might kill you in the end.
Dilly Dally played quite a few sets at SXSW this year , their live show is just so good. They’re taking it all over North America this year, and we’ve got some new dates below along with the video for “Snake Head” from last year’s terrific album Sore. This is the song they’ve been opening with on tour, and it serves as a hell of an introduction, an infectiously ugly mess of howling and pounding and melodic lead guitar. Scott Cudmore’s clip finds the band having a humorous subtitled conversation in a shitty apartment. All the bands out there making garbage music videos should take note: This is a great example of how you can make an entertaining video on a low budget
The stop-start clip pairs up with the group’s recent set-opener, and find the four-piece in ultimate self-referential mode. “Music videos are bullshit,” they claim just seconds into the, er, music video, “What a waste of time, what a waste of money.” From there on out, they go all-in on their boredom, ironically producing one of the best videos of the year so far in the process.
‘Snakehead’ is taken from ‘Sore’, their phenomenal debut album. finding them on the verge of becoming one of the most vital groups around.
Dilly Dally will be part of the performers on the holiday special. The Strombo Show which welcomes Dilly Dally onto the program for an intimate holiday performance from the home of George Stroumboulopoulos
Here is a peek of what’s to come with the closing track off the band’s excellent debut album, Sore.
The Strombo Show is celebrating 10 years on the radio dial in 2015, hosted by award-winning personality GeorgeStroumboulopoulos on CBC Radio 2, Sunday nights 8 – 11 PM. It’s a program created by music lovers for music lovers, celebrating the conversation around song. There are no boundaries, with the gamut running from Aretha Franklin to Slayer and everything in between. We have welcomed many musical guests onto the program, including major international artists like Queens of the Stone Age, The National, Ani DiFranco, Vampire Weekend, Ghostface Killah, Steve Earle and Patti Smith to Canadian talent such as Neil Peart, Blue Rodeo, Gord Downie, Tegan & Sara, Death From Above 1979 and City & Colour.
Dilly Dally performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded October 28, 2015.
The word “aggressive” came up a lot when Dilly Dally’s breakout debut, Sore, came out last fall.
“Yeah, but we’re aggressive about a lot of very positive ideas,” clarifies singer/guitarist Katie Monks. “Everyone in the band has their own reasons as to why we gravitated toward heavier music or ‘aggressive music.’ I really like epic, exciting things. I like exciting video games that are violent, and I like movies with explosions and dragons and aliens, and I like hanging out with people who are weird and cool, and I like to eat lots of hot sauce. So, when I listen to music or go see a live show, specifically, I want to be engaged. I want something to move around to…to push people around to…and something that isn’t just hand-claps. I want something that is an escape. It’s an escape!”
Katie Monks and Liz Ball first moved to Toronto in search of “restless punks and somewhere to go and fuck shit up.” What they found, however, was a crushing disappointment.
“There was this weird indie folk thing going on and it was really boring,” lead singer Monks says of the Canadian scene of 2010. “Our music was way louder – and there were no hand claps or tambourines.”
Having grown up listening to Radiohead and The Libertines (“They were like fuck everything and let’s carve out a place in this world where we can truly be ourselves. There was something very punk about that”), Katie and guitarist Liz eventually found the paradise they craved. “We had to find people who shared the same amount of aggression as we did. That’s when we found Jimmy [Tony, bass] and Ben [Reinhartz, drums]. That was huge.”
Operating under the mantra of “Simplicity is powerful”, Dilly Dally’s music is aggressive and immediate in a way Pixies and Sonic Youth fans will adore. Monks’ voice sets them apart from being mere revivalists, though. Ragged and pained, she howls her way through the songs on debut album ‘Sore’ and writes lyrics like an unfiltered live journal.
“I’m always exploring my voice,” she says. “A lot of women sing very soft and sweet and it feels hard to relate to. Expressing your anger is positive. My influences are male singers: Hamilton Leithauser of The Walkmen, Wolf Parade, Frank Black, Sonic Youth. I like music where I just think, ‘Fuck, this is me’.”
check out ‘Know Yourself’ – Their cover of the Drake hit is monumental, taking it somewhere completely new. It’s a feedback-flecked, punk-rock roller coaster.
Toronto’s Dilly Dally put out a fantastic LP with Sore, featuring incomparable vocals by the dusty voiced KatieMonks, who shreds tracks apart by use of her voice and blaring guitar. This is evident on songs like “The Touch,” where driving drums pummel over echoing guitar fuzz, and Katie rasps over the song’s ending with multiple “oh whoa whoa oh”s that seem too natural for someone who sounds like they’re ripping their voice apart. “Witch Man” has Monks singing interesting melodics and breaking into a haunting howl that works all too well. This entire album is meticulously planned out and tastefully composed, loud and thunderous.
Sore, is the debut record from Toronto’s Dilly Dally is a dark and fragile post-punk album that deeply concerns itself with gender dynamics and sexual expression. Despite clear feminist underpinnings, all these girls had in mind at the time was making rock music that reflected their experience. “We were really just trying to make a rock album,” lead singer Katie Monks told me in an interview earlier this year. Then her fellow founding member Liz Ball quickly followed that up: “[Sore] is obviously resonating really deeply for both sexes. Which is the goal, and which is quite feminist I guess.” Whatever the intention, the result is clear: Sore is a combustible, seething collection of honey-sweet, venomous rock songs that achieved all the goals Monks and Ball might have had and more. Dilly Dally burned their way to the top, pegging themselves as one of this year’s most exciting bands to watch, and establishing Toronto’s burgeoning rock scene in the process
The Toronto four-piece’s blazing full-length debut, Sore, has earned rave reviews, and their live show turned heads at this year’s CMJ festival. “It feels more natural for me to be onstage than it feels anywhere else in my life — it’s like the opposite of stage fright,” says singer-guitarist Katie Monks, who founded Dilly Dally with guitarist Liz Ball, her best friend from high school. “It’s like an alternate life where you can speak a language that’s a lot more free.” Along with powerful originals like “Snake Head” and “The Touch,” their recent sets have included a memorably surly cover of Drake’s “Know Yourself.” “Nobody here calls Toronto ‘the 6’ at all,” Monks notes. “So there’s a layer of sarcasm to the cover. But it’s still a fucking awesome song! Drake is so honest about being lame that it’s endearing.”
They Say: Monks says her vocal cords are doing just fine, thank you, despite some concern-trolling she’s encountered lately. “I resent the people who wrote about the record, like, ‘Let’s see how her voice holds up on tour,'” she says. “I’m like, what the hell?! I’ve been playing shows for six years. I just do my half-assed vocal warm-up of singing Sinead O’Connor before we go onstage, and that’s it, really.”
“Purple Rage” finds post-breakup liberation in a rowdy mosh pit. “This relationship I was in fizzled out, and I was left with these negative feelings that I wasn’t good enough,” Monks says. “That song is me fantasizing about a new life and a new Katie.”
It’s kind of great, isn’t it, when you encounter a band that is new (to you) yet brings with it a sound and aesthetic that slots perfectly, filling some kind of void you never quite realised was actually there. Dilly Dally are here
Sore’s a good word to describe how you might feel after spinning through Dilly Dally’s debut album of the same name. Katie Monks’ scratchy, full-blooded howl will reel you in, and their whip-smart lyrics and pulverizing intensity will keep you coming back time and time again for another cathartic fix. Their loud, brash, toweringly epic style of rock feels is a front for the more vulnerable feelings underneath, and that only adds to their might
Of course, Dilly Dally aren’t new in the freshly-hatched-into-the-world-of-music sense. Their biography tells of founders Katie Monks and Liz Ball’s long musical connection, of six years ‘drenched in the Toronto music scene’, of ‘working shit jobs, being in debt, partying too much and hustling in a band’. By new I mean in the sense that their debut album, Sore, has just been released, and that their music is just starting to be more widely heard and appreciated.
But if said music sounds fresh it also sounds like it ought always to have been around. The album opens with a blur of fuzzed guitar and then a brilliantly roared count in, “one… two… three… four…”, in Monks’ already-shredded, raw and grainy voice. After that guitars crash, but lighter harmonies also surface, while the lyrics – deliberately sketchy, semi-audible, making the listener strain to understand, work at it, work it out – arrive with a delivery that is at once guttural, poetic (“mercuries are falling from her eyes again”) and sensual, the catches in the vocal a match for the buzz of the frenetic instrumentation. It’s quite a start, an invigorating and deeply authentic invocation of the song’s title: ‘Desire’, served up in an impressionistic but never euphemistic or coy way.
These are songs about lust and life, about feelings and experiences, but told in such a way that they sound box-fresh. There’s anger, cathartically expressed on the likes of the terrific, bracing ‘Purple Rage’ and ‘Snake Head’ (someone or something accused of “fucking with my shit” gets very short shrift), there’s loads of sex: from the opener’s furious lust to The Touch with its panting and yowling. ‘Next Gold’ tells of “making love in the parlour” while, in ‘Green’, Monks “wants you naked in my kitchen making me breakfast”, which seems like a fair enough demand tbh.
One of several highlights is ‘Snake Head’, a herky-jerky period piece (sorry) that anyone who has ever menstruated will relate to in spades. When Monks sing/screams that “snakes are coming out of my head / And there’s blood between my legs”, or matter-of-factly bemoans the fact that “these painkillers are no fun” it makes you wonder where all the other funny-and-furious, real and raw songs of women’s everyday experiences are, so apposite and essential does it sound.
Also wonderful are ‘Next Gold’ – a song of contrasts, the guitar sounds switching from indie-jangle to MBV-alike shred, the vocals from high harmonious “oohs” to gruff growls – and the exhilarating, bracing ‘Purple Rage’ that follows. This great sequence, more or less in the album’s centre, continues with ‘Get To You’, slightly slower of pace and quieter of voice, downbeat and utterly compelling.
This is a band that clearly relish this type of switch, not only with their mid song loud/quiet changeovers à la Pixies (Witch Man, Ice Cream), but also by throwing in curveballs that change the album’s internal trajectory. It’s one such moment that closes the album, piano ballad (yes, really) ‘Burned By the Cold’: sincere, utterly lacking in guitar noise, its intensity conveyed this time solely by the raspy vocal. That it makes no less of an impact than the fantastic confections of noise and thunder that precede it only goes to demonstrate the nous behind the fury, the musical smarts governing the debut of this terrific new band. Dilly Dally, where the hell have you been? We’ve been waiting for you.
The Fat Angel Sings 