Dirtmusic

Dirtmusic is one of the ‘most’ albums I have heard in so long: most musical, most complex, most intriguing, most original and, above all, most enjoyable.
Since this hit my deck I literally haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. It even comes with a free DVD that hasn’t had so much of a sniff; the music is so strong.

Dirtmusic is a band with a history that reads like a book – Evan Dando, The Bad Seeds, Willard Grant Conspiracy, Lemonheads, True Spirit, Liz Phair – and somehow they all ended up in Ali Farka Toure’s studion in Bamako (BKO is the international abbreviation for Bamako Airport) with a bunch of Touregs, Malian stars and some of Africa’s best musicians. The result is a meld of styles and methods, of instruments and tunings and of thought processes. Where Chris Eckman, Chris Brokaw and Hugo Race came from in Western music is added to Saharan Blues, desert trance, Malian percussion, and Tamashek vocal styles but what comes out of it all is something that is so much more than the sum of its parts that it may change the music that these guys make forever.
How can you make music that is as intense as ‘Desert Wind’ with its complex wails and dense percussion and with some of the most wonderful slide banjo and Guitar Rythmique and then just walk away and play the music you made before? This is the kind of music that affects and changes the players as well as the listener.

The more that you listen to this album the more you hear. There is no familiarity to breed contempt. When Chris Eckman’s vocals are set alongside those of Ousmane Ag Moussa on ‘Black Gravity’ the hairs on your neck flap in time to the guitars and you go back and listen again for the point where the two vocals touch on each other. Listening to ‘Ready For The Sign’ is like getting into a maelstrom of rhythm and following the whirlpool to its end.

The music just takes you in its wake and the familiar becomes both more so and strange beyond compare; ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ is a song I grew up with – Nico’s dead vocals set against John Cale’s drone and the fury of the Velvet’s playing; Dirtmusic create a drone of the guitars and the apparent joy of the handclaps and the backing vocals in stark relief to Chris Brokaw’s flat delivery – at last someone who has seen the harshness that Lou Reed put into the song.

After raving about Tamikrest’s ‘Adagh’ I half expected to find that the Westerners would pollute the essence of that masterpiece – none of it. This is a merger of two great powers to the benefit of both – lessons to be learned here methinks.