Why you should be digging Dijon: an Absolutely album review

The electrically honest debut album titled Absolutely (2021) moves in mysterious ways and pulsates with such raw emotion that it feels like the music is bursting free from Dijon’s safekept psyche. With the combination of his unique production style and painfully earnest lyricism, Dijon is able to tell a common story in a distinctive way. I am a huge Lucy Dacus fan and when she proclaimed that her 2022 top Spotify songs included much of Absolutely, I knew I had to give it a listen. After doing just that I entered the most chaotically calculated and defenseless world that Dijon Duenas created. It speaks volumes that I eagerly followed him and Dacus on their trail to their conjoined show with Re:SET at the Rose Bowl in May 2023. 

Absolutely sounds like a constant fight against one’s self to to admit less about how they feel and in the end, Dijon will always lose the battle. Dijon’s voice is raspy and both instrumentals and production have peculiarly jagged edges. While haphazard on their own, combined they allow him to be vulnerable for his listeners or better yet, those who he wants to be listening. There is a constant undertone of a single muse, a single person that he is hopelessly devoted to. Whether or not it’s the same person throughout, Dijon has dedication to making desperation beautiful. Half the album is begging for either forgiveness or apologies, yet he does it with such grace and openness that you never feel pity, but only respect. Absolutely’s tracks are short, but even that tells a tale of its own. His songs are quick because his messages are simple and straightforward. Dijon is not confused about how he feels and he wants you to know. 

Absolutely opens with my personal favorite, “Big Mike’s,” and Dijon paints a realistic picture of the many elegant and mundane things to love about someone. He states, “ I like how you look when you’re not listening.” He then melds and slowly builds up these sentiments towards an image almost adjacent to an A Streetcar Named Desire-esque proclamation of love and subservience with, “I might drop to my knees/Johanna please/Will you take me?.” Right off the bat, he’s unafraid to be completely unguarded. “Scratching” comes crashing in like intimacy is a ghost tracking him down. He’s acutely aware of the treacherousness of the past and poetically ignoring the logical ways it should change the present. He simultaneously is cognizant of the detrimental flaws in the relationship, yet sees the person in this flawed partnership as flawless. He is so passionate within this little minute-forty-four-second track that he is practically screaming “and it can’t be undone/Shadows stretchin’ and scatchin’ at your heels where you run” at the end. It can depict the truth about the uncomfortability and instability of entanglements, as if you’re being chased, as if you’re bound to be outrun. Dijon then displays the cyclical anger of falling into the same trap over and over with “Many Times.” It’s as short lived as it is intense and it pastes into the walls of your mind. It is ridden with bizarre percussion accompanying, “But there you go again/Putting on your own rodeo again/There you push me out, just to flash that smile and lasso me in/Well I’ve been here a thousand times.” A metaphor that Dijon constantly returns to across the record is the concept of going to or being a part of a rodeo. Whether it be riding the bull and absorbing the attention or watching nervously from the sidelines. “Many Times” conveys the painful awareness and denial of repeatedly going back to something that isn’t good for you and Dijion rationalizes it in a way that makes you think that you would do the same. 

A couple tracks later, we stumble into the magical phenomenon of “The Dress.”  It is arguably the most marketable and celebrated song on the whole record. Even people who hate music would like this song. It reins in lovers of all genres, is extremely well done, and  sonically awe-inspiring, yet at the end of the day it is also just simply catchy. Being the ear worm that it is, “The Dress” creeps, squirms, and eats your brain alive. Popularity aside, the lyrics are bone-crushingly honest, heartfelt, and nostalgic. It is so grotesquely relatable, that it wields the power to make someone laugh and cry within just a couple minutes. It’s an uncomplicated heart pinching call back to a past relationship that is now lost and yearned for. That between all the bitterness are pieces and fragments of goodness that never end even when relationships die. It tells the story of seeing somebody who lives in the past and wondering if they still keep up with their habits and rituals that you used to know so well. He relents, “But the dress looks nice on you still/And it always will/I hated myself for some time/For the things that I said, the things that I put in your head” and makes it known that there is freedom in every type of forgiveness. From either forgiving yourself and others, there are ways to glorify the little things that stay the same in the midst of a morose metamorphosis. Maybe we should all just “dance like we used to dance.”

“Talk Down” will grow on you like infectious poison ivy. I didn’t adore this song at first listen the way that I do now.  It is atypically rhythmic in a way that I wasn’t used to but, I quickly became infatuated. This song is more euphoric and optimistic than the rest of Absolutely. It’s as if he harnessed the chaos of the enchantment of getting to know someone and trapped it into the song. It is sweet and funny and he affirms that with “When you speak I might bend and listen to you/Hallelujah, my God/Windows fogging up in my car.” It follows the same theme of becoming obsessed with little things such as liking when someone “talks down.” This song breaks down and builds up and leaves you feeling all groovingly giddy. This a paradox when combined with the next track, “Rodeo Clown.”’ It is probably the most wonderfully pathetic on the whole album and that is saying a lot. It is strangely electronic and whiny, but that’s because of the subject matter. He contorts to a stereotypically female disposition of being stood up on a date, he sings, “But it’s half past eight and you’re late again/Well, I got those high heels on and lace/And I spent two or three hours beatin’ my face”. The significance does not derive from whatever gender normative rejection or hurt, it’s a portrayal of the time, effort, and thought that you put into something you love. Dijon proves on Absolutely that he’s not someone who cries in the dark or throws away his letters before gaining the courage to put them in the mail. He is unabashedly confident about everything he is insecure about and is not shy about expressing the matters of the heart. With conviction he proclaims, “So what are you so ashamed of?/Rodeo could kill you/I just want to kiss you/But you won’t let me near you/But I’m still here all the same”. Dijon once again ties his agony into watching a person held high within your mind put themselves at risk at the rodeo. Like they would rather be in danger than be within the comfort of commitment, but Dijon is aware that there is danger within that as well. Absolutely vouches that maybe we should all be a little less afraid of rejection and more afraid of refusing to say how we really feel. I feel positively bewitched by this beautiful 2021 tribute to vulnerability and beholden for the rose-colored lenses it provides even for just 31 minutes.