Dida

Queues

Queues, the new album from Belgian artist Dida, is years in the making. It’s a patchworked play on the luxuries and traps of reference, faith in the afterlife of musical ideas, the stretched valences of pop, a dunce’s tale.

As a title, Queues toys with translations between French and English. Though himself Flemish, Dida came to the title upon realizing that each of the album’s 7 tracks ended in some degree of a queue, the word for tail in French. The irony that a queue also amounts to, depending on context, the word for dick, line, or, aptly, a succession of songs or arrangements is not lost on him. Instead, it deepens its resonance to this arch collection of songs and ideas initially conceived as a concept album, at the heart of which is a hero, a quixotic DJ, collapsing time and form in the wooing of an unrequited love. Across the record, a love letter spins on a dime, breathless, breezy, and wide-eyed.