Austin and FFF fave Dessa has been a 512 fixture for the last five years, alongside Doomtree labelmates Cecil Otter, P.O.S., Sims, Mike Mictlan, and Dallas/Floridian backstop Astronautalis. At 2pm Sunday, sans her testosterone crew but with the angelic Aby Wolf on vocal backup, darling Dessa owned the Blue stage heart and soul(fulness).
Opening with her initial breakthrough “Dixon’s Girl,” a slow-building, gin-soaked, and sloe-eyed ballad of regret and reaction set to a spare, NOLA backbeat, the 32-year-old Minneapolis MC owned the stage and, as ever, the audience.
It’s a testament to just how far Dessa has come in the past five-odd years.
Couture-wise, she matched no less than Slayer with her black-on-blacker-on-blackest outfit, a trademark that only accents the emotional gravitas and longing of her lyrically remarkable couplets. When she jumped into the crowd at FFF for the finest in-your-face rendition of no-tears tearjerker “The Lamb,” off her third and latest LP Parts of Speech, there was no stopping her.
Follow that masterful bit of audience engineering with a bleeding heart rendition of broke-up/move-forward showstopper “Mineshaft II” from 2010 debut A Badly Broken Code, and then the lock-pick fearlessness of “Skeleton Key” and melancholic postmortem “The Man I Knew,” and you have maybe the single best Doomtree alum’s daylight gig in Austin history.
Prince? We adore him. Still, there’s a new queen on the Minneapolis/global scene, and her name’s Dessa, darling.
For more Fun Fun Fun Fest coverage, see www.austinchronicle.com/fun-fun-fun-fest. For photo galleries from the fest, see austinchronicle.com/photos.
This article appears in November 8 • 2013.