The Dirty Three: a retrospective, in three parts

Part 3: recent years

Writing about music is not the same as listening to music. Music writing is much more welcoming of the failures or the near misses, the albums or bands that try valiantly but don’t quite make it, or the artists or bands that just flat-out suck. Where the listener wil shun such works, the writer will often pounce on them with glee. Which is not to say that those of us who choose to write about music don’t appreciate the chance to spread the word about something we absolutely love, it’s just that you can’t do that all the time. It’s difficult. There are only so many ways you can say “this album is amazing” before it all starts to get a little repetitive. It’s a lot easier to write about the duds and the not-quites.

The Dirty Three have never released a dud album in their career, and only a very small handful of dud songs (almost all of them on their very first album, Sad and Dangerous). But in 2002 they found themselves reaching a “not-quite” moment. It was their first in rather a long time.

Over their previous three albums they’d steadily and unassumingly built up a body of work that saw them become arguably the best band on the planet – or the best that anybody had heard of, at any rate. So it’s easy to understand why they should want to continue in that same vein with their next album – but because they were continuing in that same vein, it’s easy to understand why they faltered.

The first thing to say about 2002’s She Has No Strings Apollo is that it’s not inherently a bad album. In fact it’s really quite a good album, and it’s tempting to ponder whether it would seem quite as disappointing as it does if it hadn’t had the misfortune of following up the stunning Whatever You Love, You Are. But really, that’s a fruitless line of inquiry: albums aren’t created in isolation, and the band must have known full well just how good Whatever You Love was and just how much of an effort it would be to provide it with a “worthy” follow-up.

So, standing next to that musical Everest, it’s not surprising that artistically She Has No Strings Apollo seems a little short-statured. There’s a lot of exciting stuff in there, but it’s hard for me to escape the feeling that for the first time in their discography the band were almost trying too hard: while the opening song, “Alice Wading”, is the most searching and adventurous track they’d recorded since perhaps “Indian Love Song” way back on the self-titled album, the second (almost-title) track “She Has No Strings” seems to be just grinding gears for most of its length. It’s exciting, sure, but it never quite builds to anything, certainly not the heights the band’s fans had by now become accustomed to. It’s a bit like listening to a high-powered car rev its engine: the excitement is all in the promise. But for all the effort put into the playing, the promise is never quite delivered; the car never quite starts.

As I said, this is not to suggest that She Has No Strings Apollo is not a good record. It is that; perhaps very good. If it was from any other band I’d probably be raving about it. But by this stage of their career the Dirty Three had built up such a weight of expectation that anything even slightly lacking seemed like a massive disappointment. If I could hear it in isolation I’d probably love it; indeed there are almost certainly times when I’ll put it on rather than any other of their albums. There are moments of almost stunning beauty, most notably the tiny, repetitive piano flourish on “Long Way To Go With No Punch”, and especially the way piano on that song flows in and out of the violin lines and then is finally given its own moment in the spotlight (both instruments, incidentally, were played by Warren Ellis); but if ever a Dirty Three album was going to sound like the band going through the motions, this was it. That those motions are so magnificent softens the blow somewhat, but not entirely. By this stage of their career the Dirty Three had been mining different aspects of the same seam for five albums; it was inevitable that even such fertile musical minds as those of Ellis, Turner, and White would eventually run out of, if not quite ideas, then at least enthusiasm. Of course, this is all just conjecture: apart from one wordless glance across a merch desk I’ve never met any of the members of the Dirty Three; I don’t generally read interviews with musicians; I don’t know what was in their heads and hearts when they recorded this album. I’m just a listener, and all I can comment on is what I hear. Other people, doubtless, will hear very different things from me. In She Has No Strings Apollo I hear weariness.

But we can forgive them for it. By that stage of their career the Dirty Three had recorded an incredible body of music. Anybody who has any interest in contemporary music should own copies of each of the Dirty Three’s albums from the self-titled through to Whatever You Love, You Are. Don’t stop there, though: there are some rarer gems that are well worth tracking down. One of these which I really can’t go without mentioning (and which somehow I managed to forget to mention last time around, all the same . . .) is Lowlands. Originally, like Sharks, released as a tour-only record (on the Whatever You Love tour), it was briefly available more generally but now seems to have dropped off the radar again, which is a great pity. The album is comprised of eight relatively short songs, many with a subtle country inflection to them; collectively they’re warm, and soft, and low-key and mellow. They were recorded from 1998-99, the same time that Ocean Songs was released, and that lineage is clearly visible: Lowlands is, you might say, the terra firma counterpart to Ocean Songs. However, the songs here generally lack the sometimes unsettling sense of isolation that marks Ocean Songs: these are gentle songs, songs of home and hearth, songs equally at home on a sunny day as on a rainy night. Only at the end, on the final two tracks “Time After” and “Irish Red”, do things get loud; everywhere else, this is the Dirty Three at their most relaxed and soothing – adjectives that are not always associated with the band.

Back to the timeline. Before Cinder came out in 2006, news that the Dirty Three were working on a new album was greeted warmly as a kind of a come-back: after all, after the thick ’n’ fast rush of albums in their first decade, the wait since She Has No Strings Apollo had been noticeably prolonged. But the band hadn’t really disappeared: if the fact that they were now living on different continents made it more difficult for Turner, Ellis, and White to collaborate as often as they had in the past, in many ways each of the men were more active than they ever had been, turning up in innumerable side-projects and contributing tirelessly to the music of their peers. And still finding the time to perform together occasionally, too – as demonstrated on the Live! At Meredith album, recorded in 2004.

That recording finds the band in a relaxed frame of mind, so much so that it’s sometimes a little jarring to those of us who remember the frantic descents into white noise that marked their earlier performances. There’s no feed-back here: just beautiful music. There’s also a typically entertaining example of one of Warren Ellis’s trademark idiosyncratic monologues that serve as introductions to and spurious explanations of the Dirty Three’s songs – in this case, a story about seeing James Brown in an airport that leads into a performance of “She Has No Strings”. “This is a song about taking your hat off to the great man, Mr. James Brown” Ellis claims – I guess when there aren’t any lyrics in your song, you can ascribe any explanation you want to them.

It’s a typically generous set, taking in songs from all stages of the band’s career – even if they do wait until near the end of the night before indulging the frequent pleads from the audience for “Everything’s Fucked”. If the recording demonstrates one thing, it’s that the Dirty Three have built up a body of work that is singular both in the sense of being unique, and in the sense that it’s all of a piece. The early songs aren’t put in the set purely as a sop to the fans; nor are the most recent songs there just to promote the latest record. The songs are all points on a continuum that has progressed with, despite the odd (very mild) hiccup, a fluidity and seamlessness that’s remarkable in popular music.

Which is not to say, of course, that all the music is absolutely identical. When the Dirty Three’s most recent album, Cinder, was released, it was perhaps not surprising that the vast majority of the critical attention paid to it concerned the fact that on one track, “Great Wave”, the Dirty Three were joined – for the first time, supposedly – by a singer. In fact, it wasn’t the first time that human voices had played a part in the band’s music: wordless singing can be heard in the background of a handful of songs in their back-catalogue, most memorably the screams that punctuate “Dirty Equation” from Dirty Three (another example of this continuous vein of singing in the Dirty Three’s repertoire appears on Cinder itself, in the form of Sally Timm’s contribution to “Feral”). But this singing had never been the traditional popular song style of singing: it’d never been at the forefront, never been the centre of attention. That changed with “Great Wave”.

Still, it’s a shame that “Great Wave” got so much attention, partly because it’s a little ridiculous to focus so much on one song from a collection of nineteen, but mainly because it’s one of the weaker songs on the album – and it’s certainly one of the weakest lyrics in Chan Marshall’s catalogue. As with the rendition of “Running Scared” with Nick Cave on the Sharks E.P., the Dirty Three do little more than provide standard band backing here, rarely taking a chance to branch out.

Still, perhaps that’s not surprising on an album that sees the band trying the most diverse range of styles they’d attempted since Sad and Dangerous. As with that very first album, some of attempts are better than others: the bagpipes and hard-driving rock ’n’ roll pulse of “Doris” aren’t as half exciting as they should be, certainly not as exciting as one of Warren Ellis’s ecstatic violin surges to the heavens. On the other hand “the Zither Player” (written by Félix Lajkó, according to the liner notes), gallops along at a great clip, the jangling mandolin that takes centre stage making the song sound for all the world like it should be accompanying footage of some desperate cross-country dash on horseback (with occasional stops for swashbucking). It’s a terrific performance, somehow managing to simultaneously generate feelings of deep seriousness and great fun.

And this is pretty much what the album’s like: a series of hits and misses, none of them particularly long and many of them surprisingly short. It seems more an album in the “scrapbook” sense of the world, a Dirty Three sampler of all the things they can do. It’s an exhaustingly long album and would almost certainly have been better twenty or thirty minutes shorter; it’s the Dirty Three’s weakest album since Sad and Dangerous, without the benefit of the doubt that that album gained from being their first – and yet, it’s a deeply fascinating and immeasurably promising album, too. Over the course of four records, from Dirty Three through Horse Stories and Ocean Songs to Whatever You Love, You Are, the band had been heading along a very particular course, but it was a course that proved on She Has No Strings Apollo to be a dead end. Cinder is the sound of the band turning the car around, checking the map, searching for another road to follow. It is, critically, the album on which the band seems to have realised that it’s time to move on and try to find new scenery to explore. Is it any wonder that the album’s so long, and has so many songs? One thing the Dirty Three manifestly does not suffer from is a lack of ideas. They music is still gushing out of Warren Ellis, Mick Turner, and Jim White. They put it all right there on Cinder, good and ill, strong and weak, strange and familiar.

So Cinder is not the sound of the band starting to lose it, as so many feared when it was released: rather, it’s the sound of a band that has too much of “it”, and just needs to figure out what to keep and what to throw out. Just like at the beginning. Ellis, Turner, and White are too intelligent not to know when things need to be shaken up. Cinder cast rays of light in all directions: the future for the Dirty Three looks bright.