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WHATEVER YOU LOVE, YOU ARE
Dirty Three
(Touch and Go)
Avant-rock students who have caught a live show by Dirty Three will know well the bizarre dynamic at the heart of this Melbourne, Australia, trio. Violin-wielding frontman Warren Ellis engages in lengthy, 'tween-song banter, spinning slurred and absurd yarns that invariably have the audience in stitches, only to clam up and let his fiddle do the talking for his band's musical passages.
It's almost as if the comic relief is a knowing, winking reprieve from the impossible beauty and emotion of Dirty Three's wordless weepers.
Save for incongruous song titles such as Some Summers They Drop Like Flys and I Really Should've Gone Out Last Night, there is no such respite on Whatever You Love, You Are, just 50 minutes of soaring squeals and sighs from Ellis' time-tested axe, set against a shuffling backdrop supplied by guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White.
While the Three's devastating 1996 album Horse Stories whipped itself into furious crescendos, and 1998's sprawling Ocean Songs was just kind of furiously ambient, the new disc holds a sense of patience and focus as well as erratic emotion. The band seems to start tunes at conception, building dense pieces from the barest of sounds -- gentle pizzicato, rumbling tom-toms. Ellis, also a sometime member of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, actually agrees to overdubs on stunning centrepiece I Offered It Up To The Stars & The Night Sky, layering on a blizzard of scales before meeting up with the band for a gorgeous melodic ascent that, 13 minutes in, explodes in orgasmic cacophony. Evocative, heart-wrenching and brilliant. Pass the whiskey and tissues.
Dirty Three play Lee's Palace tomorrow night,along with label mate Shannon Wright and Storm & Stress.
Track Listing
1.Some Summers They Drop Like Flys
02.I Really Should've Gone Out Last Night
03.I Offered It Up To The Stars & The Night Sky
04.Some Things I Just Don't Want To Know
05.Stellar
06.Lullabye For Christie