iDKHOW

iDKHOW is the abridged band name of I DONT KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME.

This mysteriously-monikered group is the creation of Dallon Weekes. From 2009 to 2017 Weekes was in emo-pop group Panic! at the Disco

Two EPs appeared: 2018’s ‘1981 Extended Play’ and 2019’s Christmas Drag’. In 2020 Weekes released debut album ‘RAZZMATAZZ’, critically acclaimed and featuring ‘Leave Me Alone’, a number 1 hit on Alternative radio.

However, that was then, this is not.

Now Weekes returns without drummer Ryan Seaman, but with the Dave Fridmann (MGMT; Tame Impala and many others!) co-produced ‘GLOOM DIVISION’. A pro-creative endeavour infused with collaboration including contributions from Joywave’s Daniel Armbruster, Louis XIV’s Jason Hill, Miniature Tigers’ Charlie Brand and Rick Alvin, Brooklyn-based jazz duo Moon Hooch and British singer/songwriter Will Joseph Cook.

That’s the preamble, on with the show!

iDKHOW’s sound and style is panoptically panoramic and oh-so positively po-mo. A mirage of bricolage, conceptually curated as a ‘band out of time’.

It’s an aesthetic that only works because it comes straight from the heart, with a healthy heap of cynicism. Free from irony and rammed with glorious bubbleglam-bop, burstin’ with nostalgic nods to pop’s rich histories and teemin’ with textual tirades. Intellectually, actually. Provocatively evocative. What’s ‘not’ to love?

Thematically addressing: 1980s media-massaged mania and hell-fearful hysteria in ‘SATANIC PANIC’ recalling when Satan was seen to reside in card games and sugary cigarettes. Misperception as manipulated deception.

Schematically redressing: the pitfalls and pratfalls of romantic entanglements on ‘DOWNSIDE’; ‘INFATUATION’ and the R&B-all-and-end-all ‘WHAT LOVE?’ A trio of introspective perspectives on blinkered thinking, guilt-riddled actions and yearning internal wrangling.

‘GLOOMTOWN BRATS’ is a takedown of narcissistic-nihilism, a musical pouring of petrol on the ultimate bonfire of vanities. Pointing out – and at – the primped and prepped caricatures the pompously privileged perform via mediated mechanisms that simply act as a distorted house of mirrors. Too blind to see it.

Weekes’ hip-schtick is redolent of Todd Rundgren’s (especially his work with Utopia) playful pretentiousness, retro-futuristic, experimentally idiosyncratic and fundamentally charismatic. PURE POP!

The far from downbeat ‘GLOOM DIVISION’ is an off-loading of the innerself, a neuro-dive-urgency, a re-design for life and peacocking a snook at the fallible, the gullible and the risible. ALL IN ONE PLACE.