Dirtbombs, The - We Have You Surrounded (Album)
I first heard of the Dirtbombs about 8 years back when You Am I brought them over for a tour of Oz and, from those reports, the band kicked holes in people’s heads. Things haven’t mellowed out for the band on this latest release, in fact this record has more head-breaking ability than most albums I’ve heard in a while. It’s an intense sound without feeling like the band have just turned their amps up to 11 and it sounds heavy without sounding like the producer has mastered everything on the red line. It sounds like a record like they used to make (now I’m sounding old again) where a band who were just intense by nature were thrown into a studio and told to play before their money ran out. This usually started late at night and didn’t finish till morning where the band, weary eyed, would stumble out of the studio into the new dawn with a record that could change the world. Instead this time the band have seen the future and this is less of an album to change the world as it is to warn the masses that the end is nigh.
It has a sound to it that I love about some albums that make it sound like it’s from a place and a time that can’t be attributed to any other. This album smells of Detroit rock city. Of which I have reliable sources tell me is where the band is from. It has a distortion that is unmistakable and oozes MC5 ferocity. It has an immediacy and urgency that we do not have time to wallow around in lengthy intros and extended guitar solos. It feels like not only does it want to hit you in the head as soon as physically possible but needs to. There’s no time to waste the end of the world is coming and you don’t even know it yet! And that’s exactly the message that “We have you surrounded” gives. From the opening track It’s No Fun Til’ They See You Cry you get distant echoed vocals crooning over the song like a doomsayers calling out from a rooftop and Fire in the Western World is like a military chant over a nasty marching band drum line.
What I like especially about this album is not only does it take the theme that the world is crumbling around us and use it to great effect but it also takes into account that if this were the last album you heard come the end of the world, they make sure to get a good jibe at the ex-girlfriend. One last word to make sure she knows she’s a bitch before we’re all thrown into a pit. Songs like Pretty Princess Day, our narrator sings “When the world is falling to pieces around you, you get us to surround you with love and affection, not to say protection, cause heaven forbid you look unprepared.” Ooh, the angst is palpable and you just know that she never really understood him. In Everlovin Man we hear, “I don’t want to be a hero, I just wanna do the best I can, keep you happy and be your everlovin man!” Tells of the pain of a man who can’t save the world but just wants someone to love. Obviously mega-bitch wants him to leap from a helicopter into a burning building to save little Timmy’s kid sister from certain doom, Die hard style. Bitch.
Anyways, even though I’ve rammed home the intense rock of this album it actually has quite a good sing-along quality about it. In fact songs like Indivisible is boppy to the point of silliness, with what I can only describe as a line of barber shop singers singing “dub dub dub dub dub dadub” in the chorus. Everlovin Man is still my favourite with some awesome girls singing in the chorus Supremes-style that I have stuck in my head for days after listening to and the radio single Wreck My Flow (mega-bitch again) is just the perfect cross of old style disco drum beats with dirty rock and sing along sensibilities. This last song has more distortion on it then I knew existed and it sounds great. It’s dirty in that it’s sounds dirty rock but at the same time it’s dirty like that phych ward employee who licks Sarah Connors face as she’s strapped to a bed in Terminator 2. Eeeew. You can dirty dance to it too which is not a bad thing.
The album rocks on defiantly in its cause and in a really cool twist…the end of the world comes! On the title track We Have You Surrounded over a thumping riff you can hear the musical versions of the sound of machine guns, cars crashing, people screaming as you would imagine an army sweeping death and destruction over a city. And the only words you hear are, “we have you surrounded!” Then Race To The Bottom is an eight and a half minute instrumental epic of how I can only describe as the sound of the end of the world. You can mainly hear computers whirling and TV’s buzzing and the general sounds of mechanical disembodiment as there is nothing left on earth but the sound of broken up machines having their last fit as the power runs out. What’s really interesting though is that you could have ended the album right there. It would have been perfect! The end of the world in a musical nutshell but they come out trumps with a beautiful song sung in French called La Fin Du Monde. I haven’t finished translating it but the title is pretty much “The end of the world.” It’s such a sweet and gentle (yet distorted, don’t forget that) song that it’s like we’re all floating up to heaven. Brilliant!
The only fault I can see in the album is the next and final track. A cover of INXS’s Need You Tonight which not only does not fit the theme of the album at all, it really isn’t that great a cover. However, you can see why the band did it. The cool deep, Isaac Hayes-esque vocals of Mick Collins, suit the overly sexy style of Michael Hutchens and the rest of the band can really sex up distortion like no other but for some reason I think they just don’t pull it off. I’m not sure if they tagged it on there as a bonus track for the Aussies or whether they just put it there for every album but I would have preferred to have seen it as a B-side to a single. But I guess with the death of the single format the only place left for random covers and odd songs is the end of albums. How ironic that an album about the end of the world would inadvertently pay tribute to the end of the world for the single. Hopefully with the digital age of music approaching us this record isn’t predicting the end of the world for the album! This record is a testament to the album format being so much more than the sum of its parts and is ability to convey so much more than a single track ever could. Viva L’Rock!
