Wearing scars like glittering jewels: Dilly Dally
I listen to Dilly Dally on the subway. My eye flit from person to person and at my own reflection in the door across from me as I sway with the inertia of the moving train. I listen to them when I’m on the bus as I look at the mix of new and crumbling buildings blurring past. I listen to Dilly Dally when I’m walking down the street. I look at the scribbles on the alleyway walls, at people grinding cigarette butts into the sidewalk. Something about Dilly Dally’s music suits movement. It affects my gait — I feel coiled to spring.
Exciting things are happening in the Toronto punk scene. Bands like The Beverleys, HSY and HotKid mark a resurgence in punk rock, with women featuring prominently. It seems like the more I look for it, the more treasures I find in the Toronto music scene. Dilly Dally are at the heart of that. They embody the restless, noisy grunge-punk sound that makes you sway and nod along and drills right into your core. You can barely understand a thing frontwoman Katie Monks sings but you can feel it. They’re reminiscent of Nirvana — Monks and guitarist Liz Ball cite Kurt Cobain as a major musical influence, as well as Pete Doherty, Christopher Owens and the Pixies — but they’re unquestionably a sound of their own. And while they may exude a laid back stoner vibe in interviews, their songs are short, incredibly charged bursts of contemplation and emotion.
“Desire” was the first song I heard by Dilly Dally. It’s a song that feels messy and corporeal. It feels like puberty when you started getting that funny feeling in the pit of your stomach and you didn’t know what to do with it. “Charlie saw me after school and then I get desire/ Inside her.” It treads water in desire. It tries to keep its head above desire. It dips under. “Chocolate legs are danglin’ from the skies, I get desire/ Milky waves are fallin’ from her eyes, I get desire.” It’s relentless and consuming. “This fire, this fire, this fire, desire.” Unsure of how to word it, I described the song to a friend as “vomiting emotion.”
The whole Sore album reads to me like a retrospective ode to growing up. Not in the cute now that I am older I can see things with clarity way, but in the what do I do now, when do I know I’ve made it out ok? way. “Just because my heart is clean/ Doesn’t mean it’s new/ I scrub it up with love anthems written for teens/ Like by the Libertines.”
Sore is full of songs that look to understand the muddled freaky feelings of being young-becoming-older but not yet understanding them. “No, I never meant to hurt you/ Only make you understand/ Snakes are comin’ out of my head/ And there’s blood between my legs.” A part of these songs resist those confused feelings. But mostly, the songs ask you to feel them. They’re looking for you to echo those feelings so that maybe you both can understand them. “Yeah, I am still your friend/ Yeah, I’m just dealin’ with/ All the creatures that keep fuckin’ with my shit/ Don’t you relate to it?” Their lyrics have a habit of dancing around an articulation of those feelings and in that way, they’re very honest.
How do you put into words feelings you haven’t fully realized yet? Screaming seems an appropriate reaction. “Oh well, her dreams they fade beneath the sun/ Tryin’, but no one’s listening.”
I saw Dilly Dally for the first time earlier last month at Lee’s Palace (one of my favourite music venues in Toronto). They were returning from a tour, just in time for Canadian Music Week. One thing was very clear: they were happy to be back in Toronto. They love Toronto. They‘re comfortable in Toronto. They can kick back on their couch and chill out in Toronto. They can pee with the door open in Toronto. Monks dilly-dallied around the stage, keeled over and played guitar lying on her back like it was her house. They kind of all keeled over at one point, slouching over their guitars like zombies.
If you’ve read a couple of interviews with Dilly Dally and if you’ve browsed through their social media pages (like I have), it probably didn’t take long to see that Dilly Dally are looking for a good time. They’re the first to admit that they can be found wherever the people are cool, the kush is good and, preferably, karaoke is available. Let’s get one thing straight, though: Dilly Dally like to keep things chill, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have ambition. And they definitely care a lot about their art.
In one interview, Katie Monks and Liz Ball’s demeanours are almost laid back to a fault. They slouch in their chairs and respond to questions with wry, languid jokes until — something the interview says strikes a chord, and then they’re with him. The interviewer asks them about their cover of Drake’s single “Know Yourself” with its iconic line, “Runnin’ through the 6ix with my woes.” He asks why they decided to cover that song. Their immediate reaction is to deadpan that it was an “easy” song to cover, but then something the interview says triggers them — the mention of how Drake has become a mascot of sorts for Toronto. Then Katie Monks takes a serious tone.
“I mean, is it really [about Toronto]? Or is it about Drake?” she asks before going on, “He’s like, got the whole reputation of the city on his back and I’m starting to — at first I thought it was so fun and cool, you know, that everywhere I went people knew what Toronto was and that everyone was excited about it. But now I’m just getting to a point where — man, the Toronto that we know and love is just, like, a bunch of cool punk bands and noise bands and people screaming in garages and basements.”
Drake is drawing a lot of attention to Toronto. Which is pretty cool for Toronto. But the prevalence of his musical portrayal of Toronto inevitably comes at the cost of other musical perspectives of Toronto. Toronto is that “14 Fort York shit,” where one can be found “runnin’ through The 6 with my woes,” but it’s also the place where “I’ll meet you/ In December/ I’ll meet you/ In the cold.”
Because that’s the Toronto that Monks knows. The little sister of David Monks, frontman of the GTA’s beloved indie rock group Tokyo Police Club, she has probably spent many afternoons in garages with restless punk kids, smoking weed, talking shit and slamming guitars. This is Toronto with the west end dives and the dank basement smell. Multiple people have told me they think Toronto is an ugly city and I suppose it is in the same way that Les Demoiselles D’Avignon is an ugly painting. In the same way that someone screaming at you over the grinding of electric guitars and hammering drums and getting right to the core of what’s troubling your mind is an ugly sound.
Just look at the cover art of Sore and that’s Dilly Dally: softness and grit. A pastel pink mouth being pierced bloody by the jewels it’s supposed to kiss. Sticking your tongue out at demureness, diplomacy, and sobriety. Feeling the sting that comes with opposing conventions. Trudging through the sludge of opposition. Finding the route to be quite scenic anyway. Whispering an uncertain question between ear-splitting screams. Following an unformed feeling because it feels good. Finding people who feel the same as you along the way. Burning desire and green love. Wearing scars like glittering jewels.
I listen to Dilly Dally with the volume turned up loud so it fills my head. I listen to them when I’m bored and when I’m sad. They sound perfect on a grey day. I listen to them when I’m happy and when I’m thinking about parts of the past. They also sound perfect when the sun is so bright it blinds you. But I always listen to them moving forward. Their music isn’t the kind of noise that stands against you — it’s the kind of noise that pushes you forward.
