That sound, that shimmer...
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Photo by Ilix - http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Ilix
JULY 2000: A rainy day in Glebe, Sydney, Australia. Some electric violin, the sound of tin shimmering as if drum patterns can form light, a guitar chord thickening with one stroke like someone lightly touching the back of your neck. What a sweet chill it is: The Dirty Three, loud and clear. New music for a dying afternoon at Badde Manors café. Outside the window the street running with water, people running too, for shelter or for home. It's not night time yet. But the weather is bringing on a closed feeling. This is one of those days when you could just give up on yourself and cry. Or keep walking, keep getting wet, disappear, never to be seen again - a day at least for imagining that, and calling your imagination 'hope'. No bad feeling, really.I know it's the Dirty Three's new recording, Whatever You Love, You Are. Mainly because it could be a sound that has rolled on from Horse Stories or Ocean Songs, one long seamless jam called a career or a struggle, ravishing with feedback, settling back with a sigh. The Paganini in Warren Ellis's violin playing so clear and plucked and ecstatic, Jim White's drumming military with grief and drama, Mick Turner there like his paintings, all dreamy and soft even in the furious moments. The same and not the same as always. Because there's a new note here, and I am catching it in my chest. Can't say what it is exactly, but I love the title, Whatever You Love, You Are, because its harsh, even judgmental as much as it may be romantic. It depends on you.Listening to this it seems to me that the Dirty Three are getting better. The landscapes they make are stretching in feeling, becoming more beautiful and wild - in a funny way it sounds as if they are all relaxing, feeling less of a need to prove themselves and their instrumental head-trips and heart-rips with loud blasts of power which say "we're here, we're defined, we're solid". It's like they believe more than ever now in letting you (the listener) go. Maybe that's all there is to say about this recording. That the Dirty Three let you go.It's hard to find that time, that sound, that shimmer anywhere else today. Kinda pure, very kind, with an ache and something electric and alive inside. A room to move kinda sound, which is why they have musical friends like Cat Power and Will Oldham, space makers, frontier people all of them.I get lots of pictures in my head when I hear the Dirty Three: the Pacific Ocean at night, a fishing line dropping through the black surface, rain all the way from their home in Melbourne's Fitzroy Street coming here to get me today, long drives across icy middle America under a nowhere moon, a girl in Paris who dresses crazy, cheap pasta dinners, sleeping on a lounge, an argument between friends beneath a streetlamp, a naked New York wind at 2am walking home, the stage spotlight filling with smoke as they perform, some big chaos above us tearing at the ceiling, being drunk in a kitchen, windscreen wipers dragging on your thoughts just like in Drugstore Cowboy, petrol stations flourescent and humming, a fucked-up paperback (Richard Ford, Jim Thompson, Baudelaire), oil paint on your clothes, a real nice easy blue oil most of all, crashing out on the floor with an Indian blanket, beer bottles clinking, a favorite song on the radio, a baby's on the way, better get it together... yeah, I hear all that and some sense of lost friendship remaking itself in this sound. I hear a great band.But maybe I'm just looking out a rainy window in Glebe, oh I dunno for sure, I dunno for sure.....
JULY 2000: A rainy day in Glebe, Sydney, Australia. Some electric violin, the sound of tin shimmering as if drum patterns can form light, a guitar chord thickening with one stroke like someone lightly touching the back of your neck. What a sweet chill it is: The Dirty Three, loud and clear. New music for a dying afternoon at Badde Manors café. Outside the window the street running with water, people running too, for shelter or for home. It's not night time yet. But the weather is bringing on a closed feeling. This is one of those days when you could just give up on yourself and cry. Or keep walking, keep getting wet, disappear, never to be seen again - a day at least for imagining that, and calling your imagination 'hope'. No bad feeling, really.I know it's the Dirty Three's new recording, Whatever You Love, You Are. Mainly because it could be a sound that has rolled on from Horse Stories or Ocean Songs, one long seamless jam called a career or a struggle, ravishing with feedback, settling back with a sigh. The Paganini in Warren Ellis's violin playing so clear and plucked and ecstatic, Jim White's drumming military with grief and drama, Mick Turner there like his paintings, all dreamy and soft even in the furious moments. The same and not the same as always. Because there's a new note here, and I am catching it in my chest. Can't say what it is exactly, but I love the title, Whatever You Love, You Are, because its harsh, even judgmental as much as it may be romantic. It depends on you.Listening to this it seems to me that the Dirty Three are getting better. The landscapes they make are stretching in feeling, becoming more beautiful and wild - in a funny way it sounds as if they are all relaxing, feeling less of a need to prove themselves and their instrumental head-trips and heart-rips with loud blasts of power which say "we're here, we're defined, we're solid". It's like they believe more than ever now in letting you (the listener) go. Maybe that's all there is to say about this recording. That the Dirty Three let you go.It's hard to find that time, that sound, that shimmer anywhere else today. Kinda pure, very kind, with an ache and something electric and alive inside. A room to move kinda sound, which is why they have musical friends like Cat Power and Will Oldham, space makers, frontier people all of them.I get lots of pictures in my head when I hear the Dirty Three: the Pacific Ocean at night, a fishing line dropping through the black surface, rain all the way from their home in Melbourne's Fitzroy Street coming here to get me today, long drives across icy middle America under a nowhere moon, a girl in Paris who dresses crazy, cheap pasta dinners, sleeping on a lounge, an argument between friends beneath a streetlamp, a naked New York wind at 2am walking home, the stage spotlight filling with smoke as they perform, some big chaos above us tearing at the ceiling, being drunk in a kitchen, windscreen wipers dragging on your thoughts just like in Drugstore Cowboy, petrol stations flourescent and humming, a fucked-up paperback (Richard Ford, Jim Thompson, Baudelaire), oil paint on your clothes, a real nice easy blue oil most of all, crashing out on the floor with an Indian blanket, beer bottles clinking, a favorite song on the radio, a baby's on the way, better get it together... yeah, I hear all that and some sense of lost friendship remaking itself in this sound. I hear a great band.But maybe I'm just looking out a rainy window in Glebe, oh I dunno for sure, I dunno for sure.....
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