Dici’s increasingly surreal sound has garnered him a lot of attention from the underground press, and while this sound is relatively intact for the new single “Do What I Can,” there’s undeniably something fresh penetrating the core of this player’s artistry. From what I can tell, Dici’s melodicism is quickly becoming his main squeeze in the studio, which comes in stark contrast to the drill-inspired aggression that so many of his peers have been cultivating lately. He’s putting pop simplicity on the front burner here, and potentially paving a way for even more pop exposure with this track.
The melodies in “Do What I Can” are supremely dark but always saddled with a bit of catharsis on the other end of every verse. Where Dici has the opportunity to be pretty emo with the concept of the premise, he’s sticking with a relatively cut and dry delivery that leaves us to interpret the greater emotional context of the verses rather than going off of their cosmetic meaning alone. Versatility has always been something this player has going for him, and in this sense, I would say that there’s not much different about what we’re seeing and hearing from his latest work.
Although it falls short of emo, there’s no denying the raw passion that Dici carries with him to the microphone for “Do What I Can” and, moreover, what he’s able to do with it inside of just three minutes here. He wants to use the mood in this music to tell a story that words can only account for to a certain degree, and over the course of the last couple of years, he’s figured out how to do this while avoiding some of the more predictable elements in pop music that have kept similar crossover artists from making it big.
This agile execution has become one of my favorite qualities in almost every Dici song, and his sharpness is everything I would want it to be in “Do What I Can.” He’s shown us in the past that he can modulate when necessary, if for no other reason than to set up a backdrop that his words can turn into a theatre of emotion and melodicism, but he has no reason to hold back in this performance – everything he wants to say here requires a little more push than the standard would, and he’s prepared to give it.
The reputation that Dici has created for himself around the underground is as solid as he could hope for right now, and “Do What I Can” is a good measurement of his continued growth in the studio. As a songwriter, this guy has come a long way in a short amount of time, and I don’t think there’s any reason to doubt his ongoing evolution after taking a peek at what this new single and music video is made of. As usual, Dici is raising his bar and that of his scene, and sounding pretty suave while doing so.
Mindy McCall
