Unlike past recordings where the band tried to capture their live potential, this time they thought about how they might perform the songs later. As such, the tracks on "Cinder" are much shorter, trimmed down, and classic in composition. Sally Timms (Mekons) and Chan Marshall added guest vocals.
Dirty Three
Cinder
[Touch & Go; 2005]
Rating: 6.7
Everybody likes one Dirty Three album but nobody likes all of them, and your favorite is probably the record you heard first; this fine and original band engenders an odd sort of fanship fatigue. For a while it seemed as though the records sounded too much alike, but Dirty Three found ways to change up the sound through multi-tracking and shift of focus, so that's not quite it.
The weariness has I think more to do with the inherent drama and love of dynamics in the trio's approach to their respective instruments. You think violin, guitar, and drums, and you figure there's something in there that might work as background music, but Dirty Three albums ask a lot. With their inevitable crescendos, every song eventually butts its way into whatever you're doing. You're either paying close attention or you're listening to something else.
On Cinder, Dirty Three seem ready to pare back and let the songs inhabit comparatively modest worlds. Most of these 19 tracks are relatively short mood sketches that will likely be pushed in grander direction in a live setting. There's a bit more instrumental variety, too, with Warren Ellis adding mandolin and piano to some tracks, and Mick Turner contributing bass and organ. "Doris" surprises by beginning with huge drums (turns out Jim White knows how to play a straight backbeat) and angular, almost funky guitar, before reaching a moment of jubilation with a jagged blast of bagpipes from guest Mark Saul. "The Zither Player" is an extrapolation of a theme by Hungarian fiddle player Félix Lajkó, and its jittery upbeat rhythm and Gypsy melody is unusually danceable for the D3. On the other end of the spectrum are quiet set pieces like "Ever Since" and "Amy", on which restrained playing by Ellis allows the simple beauty of trio's group interplay to gel.
Another first: Cinder has vocals. "Great Waves" has Dirty Three backing Chan Marshall to lovely effect; as with her 1998 record Moon Pix, Marshall's hushed ethereal leanings sound particularly convincing stitched up in the rhythms of Turner and White. And she remembered to bring her newly sharpened sense of melody. Sally Timms' wordless cooing on the shapeless "Feral", on the other hand, is far less satisfying, bordering on pointless. Still, on their seventh album, any expansion in approach is welcome, and even the excesses of traditional D3 builders like "She Passed Through" are easy to swallow. If much of it is merely pretty, this is easily the most diverse and wide-ranging Dirty Three record yet, absolutely the right thing for them to be doing at this time. It doesn't ask for or promise nearly as much, which is just the breather needed.
-Mark Richardson, November 10, 2005
Review by Thom Jurek
Australia's Dirty Three have covered a lot of ground over their ten-year career, and always as a trio: violinist Warren Ellis (also a prominent member of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds), guitarist Mick Turner, and drummer Jim White (the latter two are also known as the Tren Brothers). The band have continually re-examined their sound, and looked for different textures and dynamics while retaining their original instrumentation. Not this time. This is the Dirty Three as you have never heard them before. Their sound is unmistakable, but their creation process has changed significantly. For starters, the record was not done live in a studio. Secondly, the band employs a greater range of instruments. Ellis adds viola, bouzouki, piano, and mandolin to his cache, and Turner plays organ and bass as well as guitar. There are also two vocal tracks on the set, Sally Timms of the Mekons appears on "Feral," and Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power) wrote the lyrics to, and sings, "Great Waves." Mark Soul also plays bagpipes on "Doris." What it all amounts to is the most adventurous recording in band's catalog. And the experiment pays off in spades. There are 19 tracks here, most of them under four minutes and all but two under five. In other words, Cinder captures the Dirty Three at their tightest, most expansive, yet most "song"-oriented album ever. It opens with White's cymbal and snare slowly and purposely announcing "Ever Since," before Turner's signature electric guitar and Ellis on bouzouki slip in unobtrusively and the melody asserts itself before Ellis' violin finds a melody in the weave and plays in, through, and around, evoking distance, melancholy, and the hint of real sorrow. The tune gains in intensity, but only enough to assert tension that goes unresolved before the band takes it down another notch on "She Passed Through." It's even slower, more meandering, yet more melodic and the shift of mood and dynamic is prescient. The recording becomes almost lushly romantic through "Amy" and "Sad Sexy," where the volume rises, the dynamic thickens, and the pace quickens. But it's still only a glimpse. The chaos begins to assert itself in the title track, which is simply an intro, a way of entering into "Doris," which quite literally explodes with Turner playing power chords in a way he hasn't since Horse Stories. "The Zither Player" also moves into hard-driven rock, albeit textured by Ellis' bouzouki. Marshall's vocal on "Great Waves," graced by Turner's guitar, is moody, drenched in gorgeous erotic poetry and kissed by the slow, unhurried, gradually unfolding drama that is an homage to eros. The dreaminess begins anew here and carries on throughout the rest of the disc. Timms' vocal on "Feral" is wordless, drifting, and spiritual like an inebriated angel trying to find a song in her memory as the band conjures that ghost above and around her voice. The elegiac "In Fall" takes Cinder out, purposeful, droning, whispering. The Dirty Three don't go at things. They look at them softly, through clouded gazes, and move around them. This has always been true. On Cinder, they engage a song itself in this way, in their way, by not trying to find its musical body, the place where it defines itself, but instead but they seek relentlessly, through investigation and elegant articulation of the journey, its spidery, impure, constantly desiring heart and find it, in all its wounded, pulsing beauty.
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