Graham Reid | | 2 min read
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this one (which comes in a gatefold sleeve with an insert lyric booklet).
Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . .
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The final song at the end of the first side of this record opens with some familiar lines, but with its menacing, quasi-industrial beat it takes a moment to register.
It is A Horse With No Name.
But where America's original evoked a lone rider on a dusty desert under the blazing sun, this treatment by the Dirt trio is more like a relentless and desperate nighttime escape and more akin to the propulsive sound of Iggy's Passenger . . . and it follows on logically from their uneasy original Danger.
This rider is under sudden thunderheads of searing guitar heading towards a dark destiny where things aren't as simple as “good to be out of the rain”.
By a reliable account from the band's bassist/guitarist/singer Nick Sampson, this was the first song Dirt singer/guitarist Malcolm Black and drummer Barry Blackler played together as 12-year olds at a smorgasbord bar one Sunday night in Dunedin during the Seventies.
We might guess those kids were trying to render it more faithful to America's original.
Those with keen ears and memory will recognise Sampson and Black as prime movers behind Dunedin's pop-soul band Netherworld Dancing Toys (they wrote the hit For Today), and maybe know Blackler more for his Blackout Management and promoter roles these days than his impressive earlier credentials as a musician (Idles, briefly in the Exponents, Starlings and J&MChain in the UK etc).
This debut – and apparently not the last – album by Dirt has been a long time coming, interrupted by the death of the much respected Malcolm Black in 2019 . . . and then of course Covid.
Black's death adds special poignancy to Blackler's electro-pop ballad Better Think Twice (sung by Black, “it's not what you want or how you get it, it's the things you do . . . we could fly high”). Black was one of those who did very good things for many musicians when he was an entertainment lawyer, manager and director of APRA, for all of which he was awarded the NZ Order of Merit.
Yet this isn't an introspective, melancholy album at all (the instruction on the back cover reads “For Best Results Play Loud”): Dreams and Happiness has a punch which belies its title, and the menacing rock of Danger delivers on the title's promise despite the bookends of tui and the spare lyrics (just five lines) which include “I know you see the rise of the danger deep inside of me”.
Even Just which starts as a slow ballad (“you've got nothing to fear about who you really are”) becomes a maelstrom of guitar rock and claustrophobic sound (which further explains that cover instruction).
Given the common musical ground these musicians had it's no surprise some of this sounds beamed into the uncertain 21stcentury from the equally unsettled Eighties: the driving Lightning Says, “we're here for a short time, come what may, just find your way”; the punchy Car Crash (again, rewards volume) and the final song No Sense At All is like their take on Horse With No Name relocated into the front seat of a Mad Max: Fury Road death squad car.
Wrapped in a gatefold sleeve by Mark Roach and Frank Turner, Bloom confirms that age does not necessarily weary anyone.
Let alone musicians committed to making a righteously threatening rock'n'roll noise.
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You can order this album direct from Blackout Management here. Or find it and the lockdown sessions Seed (of different songs) as a double vinyl at bandcamp here.
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