Best of Month: AotY #14: Black Dresses' "Forget Your Own Face"


This may come as a surprise given how much I praise Ada Rook and Devi McCallion’s work on this blog, but I actually totally missed Black Dresses when they were around. I heard Forever in Your Heart, released after their “break up,” and thought that it would be the only new one I ever heard. Then, to my shock, there was another record this year. I remember last year I had dreamed about getting to cover a new record more, maybe hoped it would place even higher in a year end list.


Well, I’m looking back at last year and that’s somehow also number fourteen. Weird.


Speaking of weird, I think even had I known that this band was around I would have just written them off. I found them at the perfect time for me personally. Before running this blog, I loved music, but I was pretty closed minded to the possibilities of what it could be, that’s actually one of the reasons I started doing this in the first place; I wanted to find new music to love, I wanted to go beyond what I expected.


Outside of the music, Rook and McCallion coming out as a couple melted my little gay heart very early in the year. It meant so much to me that in the review I posted of the record I even talked about being queer for the first time publicly and my family didn’t even catch it before I had a chance to come out to them. At the end of this one, the duo sings a song about wanting to create. That despite all the challenges being musicians has brought them all they want at the end of the day is to play music together. After the chaos, after the Travis Barker disses, the breaking down coughing on tape, this last song moves me to near tears every single time.

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