Twilight Music

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

About halfway through the new Dirty Three album, something surprising happens: A woman sings. It’s not just any woman but Chan Marshall of Cat Power; it’s surprising because since 1992, the Australian trio has used the same formula to craft raw yet lyrical indie-rock songs, and that formula has never included vocals.


For the past few years, the Dirty Three have been struggling with a common problem: how to follow up a great album. With 1998’s “Ocean Songs” they perfected their format of building loose, melancholic melodies up into tight jam sessions, with stunning results. The two albums that followed, “Whatever You Love, You Are” and “She Has No Strings Apollo,” were both quite good, but somehow left listeners dissatisfied: You can hear them searching for new paths only to return to their familiar, sad sound.


“Cinder” (Touch & Go) finds the band renewing its effort to re-imagine its sound. But the new album will please old and new fans alike. At 19 tracks, “Cinder” has almost twice the number of songs of any previous Dirty Three album. There aren’t any especially long jams or fast breakdowns, as on earlier albums, but about halfway through the second song, “She Passed Through,” the Dirty Three sound becomes distinctly ap parent. A throbbing rhythm of bass, drums, and a plucked violin feign a casual disjointedness for about a minute, then the rhythm of the song suddenly changes with the entrance of a beautiful melody, scraped raw on an electric violin.


One of the great things about this band is the lithe intuition of Jim White’s drumming. At its best, it recalls Miles Davis’s comment about the young Tony Williams: “You leave drummers alone ’cause drummers have their own inside thing.”


Dirty Three will perform October 17 at the Bowery Ballroom (6 Delancey Street at Bowery, 212-533-2111).


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