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“Chanson from a cabaret on Mars!”
Themes like feel-good voting anthems, a cumbia-rap that questions US gun culture, a surrealist jazzy-French tune on suicide, and an electro-folk-rock on the grey area of consent all coalesce on Dahlia Dumont’s third full-length studio album Fantasia.
Dahlia Dumont’s ‘The Blue Dahlia’ is a transatlantic “family” of international musicians based in NYC and Paris. The band is a high-energy mix of accordion and ukulele-colored folk, dancehall, reggae, soul and jazz, topped off with fantasy, and lyrics in French and English.
Originally from Brooklyn, singer-songwriter and ukulélé-ista Dahlia Dumont began The Blue Dahlia in 2012 with NY-based musicians hailing from Mexico, Japan, several Latin American countries and all over the US. Dahlia, herself a product of immigrant parents from the Middle Eastern and Eastern Europe, was always filled with wanderlust for music and culture, and traveled from a young age, especially to France and Senegal, picking up French as a second language. Following her first music tour to Paris in 2015, Dahlia expanded her “Blue Dahlia family,” linking up with Paris-based musicians. Dahlia now lives and performs between the two countries, and works regularly with both the NY and Paris bands.
Set to drop this December 6th, the second single from Fantasia, “SEMI-AUTOMATIC TRINKET (TAKE IT!)” addresses the madness of endemic gun violence in modern American society.
Says Dumont, “The song kind of wrote itself when I was doing a freestyle, personal rant about what makes me so sad and so angry and horrified about the world we live in. We have come to a situation where it is now normal to receive news in your inbox every two months of a shooting that’s happening in a (normally) perfectly non-violent situation — most of the time where there are children, and most of the time, it’s the children that are doing the shooting. We have to ask ourselves ‘How did we get to this place?’ ”
With bitingly clever, razor-edged lyrics like: ‘My pistols got a hard-on, gotta pop, pop it out!’ and ‘Guna watch you babies bleed for laughing at me, my semi-automatic’s gonna spread my seed!’ Dumont takes a lightly sardonic poke at the telling archetypal proximity of penises and pistols in the modern American-male psyche.
The audio single will be followed on 12/6/24 with the release of an official music video directed by Laetitia Bonne and Mathieu Maestracci which features images that move progressively from playful to dark, to outright nightmarish. Scenes with kids playing with toy guns are interspersed with scenes of Dumont and several men in suits at a poker table to evoke a dark caricature of the circular gun discourse as a high-stakes money game in the male-dominated political sphere. Scenes of demented riders laughing with guns on a carousel provide some continuity and variation on that theme of ‘going around in circles’ while adding a theatre-of-the-absurd twist.
While many will find it both refreshing and commendable that the song takes an unambiguous moral/political stand on one side of the fence or the other in a time when too many artists are toning down their stronger messages to appease the muse-killing algorithm, Dumont is clear that her intention isn’t merely to mock, but to start a conversation in hopes of bringing some sense of clarity.
“I understand that the subject is complex,” reflects Dumont, “and I understand I’m from New York City, and it’s easy for me to judge somebody who grew up with guns if it’s part of their identity and their pride, or if they feel like it’s part of being American. But honestly, if we know we live in a society where money rules all, we can begin to see that it isn’t really about that. It’s just a lie that moneyed interests are telling people so that they will take ownership of the concept …but actually, it’s just being pushed onto them.”
The candid creative spark and nuanced approach behind “SEMI-AUTOMATIC TRINKET (TAKE IT!)” are both born out of Dumont’s unique perspective on the issue of gun violence as an American expatriate (and a mother) living in France, a country that looks upon America’s gun culture with bewilderment.
“As a mother, sometimes I think about moving back to the United States,” says Dumont, “because I miss the United States. There’s so much I love about the United States, but the thought of being afraid to send my child to school because they might get shot …it is mind-blowing that’s even a reality.”
“SEMI-AUTOMATIC TRINKET (TAKE IT!)” drops on December 6th with The Blue Dahlia’s full-length album Fantasia following on April 25, 2025.