Lucrecia Dalt – A Danger to Ourselves
Lucrecia Dalt describes “cosa rara,” the first single from A Danger to Ourselves whose title translates to “strange thing,” as something like a road movie. It’s a tense blend of romance and danger inspired in equal parts by Wild at Heart and the darkly surreal eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return—she even asks at one moment, “tienes fuego?“, or in other words, “Gotta light?” With its deep grooves and dramatic but sparse arrangement, it projects the whir of the road blurring by and with outlaw intensity and knife’s edge thrills. Just before Dalt hands the song over to collaborator and romantic partner David Sylvian, who lends a spoken word coda to the cinematic saga (“It’s not amphetamines/It’s something else“), it comes to an arresting climax with the sound of a literal crash.
Following 2022’s ¡Ay!, an album that paired nostalgic sounds of music that Lucrecia Dalt heard growing up in Colombia with the sci-fi wonder of an alien bending time and space while learning of earthly sensory experiences, A Danger to Ourselves is a return to the planet’s surface. In fact it’s even more intimate than that, Dalt drawing inspiration from her own personal experience in a new relationship, a barrier she’d previously left intact. But she recognized a fear in herself of crossing that line, and much like the speed-and-crash adrenaline rush of “cosa rara,” A Danger to Ourselves explores those feelings of desire and vulnerability with an element of darkness.
A Danger to Ourselves maintains that tension between tenderness and menace, offering a brief moment of gorgeous ephemerality on “amorcito caradura” one moment and industrial abrasion the next on “no death no danger.” In the latter, Dalt declares, “Don’t call me a snake, and I’m not a reptile/but I’ll cut my stare on your sweet gaze” against a Throbbing Gristle-like sonic wheeze, its haunted trip-hop escalating into a heavier, gnarlier blues with tangled barbs of guitar. And where “divina” is as close to a straightforward pop ballad as Dalt has ever recorded, rife with heart-fluttering statements such as “you are the only one I can fool death with,” she slinks deeper into the shadows on the sensually sinister “acéphale,” where sentiments such as “your eyes/sapphires” take on a more macabre tone when you consider the title actually means “headless.”
Through the course of the album, Dalt is joined by a series of guest vocalists, including Camille Mandoki, who lends an impassioned verse in Spanish on the spectral dirge “caes,” as well as Juana Molina, providing playful taunts on “the common reader” (“you, you, you, you vain and fool… don’t you see that boredom could be a jewel“). But Dalt’s closest collaborator, percussionist Alex Lazaro, helps to bring each song alive through creatively multi-dimensional performances. Through moments like the playful and sprightly jazz brushing that arises toward the end of “divina,” or the Tom Waits-like junkyard clanks in the delightfully eerie “mala sangre,” Lazaro always finds a way to keep each song’s beating heart pumping.
Occasional moments like “stelliformia” find Dalt once again achieving a feeling of weightlessness, ascending up to a rarefied air. Dalt declares, “I become the fire that keeps on giving” against an ambient arrangement that slowly, subtly finds a storm roiling underneath. It’s in these little twists, these unexpected prickles where a pretty song becomes a transcendent one, where a great melody becomes part of a more stunning whole. A Danger to Ourselves comprises an entire album’s worth of such moments, opening up a private, intimate space only to lead us down a fascinating labyrinth of blind alleys and uncertain corridors.
Label: RVNG Intl
Year: 2025
Similar Albums:
Lucrecia Dalt : A Danger to Ourselves
Note: When you buy something through our affiliate links, Treble receives a commission. All albums we cover are chosen by our editors and contributors.
