Albums Catch-Up:
The Dirtbombs – Party Store
(In The Red)

If there was one major stumbling-block for the groups that emerged from the late ‘90s/early ‘00s garage boom, it was probably song-writing. Not to say that there weren’t a ton of great songs and great songwriters to be found within that scene of course, but whereas internet era fuzz-punks can preserve their mystique by spreading themselves across limited edition 7”s, random junk tapes, one-off mp3 downloads, fucked up live recordings and the like, the era that gave birth to bands like The Dirtbombs was a little more prescriptive.

If you were a band that was ‘going places’ in 1998, the only place it was in your power to go to was the fucking studio, to lay down the requisite twelve or fourteen original compositions required by your label, to be pressed onto a little CD that would be your calling card to the world. And there’s nothing that kills the unhinged immediacy of great garage-rock quite like having to do that, as two chord tunes that no doubt rocked the shack when playing to a well-lubricated crowd at a basement gig reveal their plodding insufficiency in the face of multiple takes, boring production details, tedious mixing decisions.

For some reason, it was the Detroit bands who often seemed to suffer worst from this affliction. KO & The Knockouts, The Hentchmen, Bantam Rooster – sure, they must’ve been great live, they had their moments on record, but can you imagine regularly slugging your way through a whole album of 3 minute+ songs by them? Can you imagine listening to their second album, their fourth? That’s not a criticism of those bands – it’s just the nature of the kind of music they play. Not everyone has the strength of character to be a Billy Childish or a Fred Cole.

It’s a truism that all garage bands essentially want to be covers bands, and all too often this leads them to a mean damned-if-you-do situation: if a band’s got a couple of great originals, you’ll be pissed when they string out their record with eight redundant covers (see The Lyres, Flamin’ Groovies etc.). And if they don’t (see the clearout bin at your local used CD shop), you’ll have found something better to do long before they’ve finished grinding through their arse-aching forty minutes of we-wrote-this-in-the-studio-cos-we-needed-a-song chord-welding.

Hearing a great live rock band pushed into the latter situation can be absolutely soul-crushing, and it’s maybe no surprise that by far the best band from this scene (or, uh, my favourite at least) – The Detroit Cobras – was the one that took being a covers band really fucking seriously, whilst The Dirtbombs were at the top of their game when they did the same on 2001’s epic soul/funk tribute ‘Ultraglide in Black’. That their all-originals follow-up album ‘Dangerous Magical Noise’ fell straight into the trap outlined above – absolutely exhilarating for a few minutes but mind-numbing in its entirety – was probably inevitable, even if seeing the band touring it was one of the most astounding live shows I’ve ever witnessed.

Since then, it is to Mick Collins’ credit that he has done his best to steer his band in some rather more eccentric directions than was really necessary to maintain a base-level touring income, and if 2007’s ‘We Have You Surrounded’ was an insane mess of a record, mixing frenzied apocalyptic noise with Sparks covers, lyrics cribbed from Alan Moore and weird anti-consumerist rapping, it certainly wasn’t anything anyone saw coming, and that’s gotta count for something. Anyway, to finally get to the matter at hand, I’d happy to report that this year’s ‘Party Store’ finds The Dirtbombs back on track in a big way – on the one hand retreating to the safety of another covers album paying tribute to Detroit’s musical heritage, but at the same time also realising a concept that takes them far further outside their comfort zone than any previous release – namely, reconfiguring a selection of classic Detroit Techno cuts for a live rock band.

I’d love to be able to act smart here, but the sad truth is that I actually know very little about Detroit Techno. I’ve probably picked up a vague idea how it sounds just by osmosis, and finding out more about it has always been on my long-list of ‘things to do’, but Soul-Jazz have never obliged me with a white-boy friendly ‘beginners guide to..’ comp and nobody’s ever sent me a link to a .zip of their best-ever-Detroit-Techno-mix to check out or anything, so, uh… sorry guys, I’m afraid I’m coming to this one blind.

Maybe that’s for the best though in some ways. I feel like knowledge of the originals might blunt my enjoyment of ‘Party Store’ somewhat, exposing these instant-killer riffs and thunderous rhythms as merely the work of misguided rock-goons aping the sleeker, more perfect sounds of producers and musicians who dedicated their lives, rather than just a few months, to living inside this music. But for the moment I’ve gotta go with what I hear, and what I hear on ‘Party Store’ is bad-ass. Trying to second-guess what the originals might sound like whilst listening to The Dirtbombs hammer them out on kit drums and fuzz guitar is actually a very enjoyable process, and one that I’m glad I’m of the right level of ignorance to experience, whilst the music, in and of itself, is just a plain blast.

The idea of recreating techno on rock band instruments is always a notion I’ve kinda liked. I mean if the point of your band is energy and repetition, you might as well go the whole hog, right? Groups who have tried this sort of thing before, such as Oneida, have often done just that, steering straight toward an extreme noise-trance whiteout, so it’s cool to hear The Dirtbombs pulling back from that precipice and remembering to aim for the dancefloor instead, to mix a few metaphors. The album’s title is self-explanatory – far from a crazy experiment or punker in-joke, this is an honest attempt to fuse the rhythmic drive and atmospheric cool of early American electronic dance music with the sound and fury of rock n’ roll, and by and large, a successful one, I’d venture to suggest.

More than just banging through the skeletons of Derrick May and Juan Atkins compositions in garage-punk style, Collins and co have worked hard to meet their source material halfway here, incorporating percussion loops, hissing distorted synths, extreme echos and a relentless motorik pulse into their arsenal, and splitting the difference between punk rock brevity and club-friendly 12” track lengths by sticking largely to a 4-6 minute middleground.

Maybe I’m just saying this cos it’s so rare to hear a black voice on a rock record, but Mick Collins really does have one of the sweetest classic soul voices currently operating in any genre (I’d love to hear him to a ballads record or something), and hearing him stretch himself around the disco-chrome glossolia lyrics of sample-based songs that were never meant to be ‘sung’ as such, turning them into weird, irresistible call & response charts is a joy (“no more rainy day / the sun will chase the clouds away / good life, good life, good life”). Even his sly faux-Germanic monotone on ‘Sherevari’ is a hoot; “Smoking on his cigarette / listening to his car cassette / cruising with his hot playmate / in his Porche from 9 til 8” – I mean, basically you could port this shit into any supercharged, no-brainer garage-punk without much difficulty, right?

Having already ploughed through nearly a thousand words on the subject already, to actually launch into an in-depth description of the music herein at this point seems almost surplus to requirements. Let’s just say that ‘Cosmic Cars’ and ‘Alleys of Your Mind’ are your new favourite late night driving tunes, ‘Tear The Club Up’ will make perfect entrance music for your forthcoming wrestling career, and ‘Strings of Life’ and ‘Jaguar’ both sound like beautiful sunrise-insomnia trance-outs that could have been pulled straight off some newly unearthed Arthur Russell/Sleeping Bag session.

As just about every review of this album has noted, the beatless 22-minute fuckaround of ‘Bugs in the Bass Bin’ does stand as something of a stumbling block to overall enjoyment, but if you’ve got the patience to let it play through once or twice then even that starts to make a twisted kinda sense. Exactly WHAT kind of sense, who the hell knows, but I was certainly liking it a lot better by the end than I was at the start.

But basically, if the idea behind this album is one that appeals to you, rest assured The Dirtbombs do it about as well as it can be done, and you can go to the record shop with my blessing for the triple-LP set, just as I will hopefully do when I have a lot of money and have already bought enough Detroit techno records to assuage my aforementioned ignorance. Just like 'Ultraglide in Black' and 'Life, Love & Leaving' served to point me in the direction of a ton of soul compilations ten years ago, funnily enough... hmm, go figure. It'd be nice to think Mick Collins might be cooking up some new tribute album concept that will push me down some unexplored alley of American music in time for 2021, wouldn't it?




http://www.thedirtbombs.net/
http://www.intheredrecords.com/

Labels: album reviews, The Dirtbombs