[review 2005: the honourable mentions]

When Chan Marshall starts singing seventeen seconds into “Great Waves,” right in the middle of the Dirty Three’s latest album, you’re hearing something new: vocals on a Dirty Three album. Nick Cave doesn’t count; he doesn’t sing so much as recite a monologue over “Time Jesum Transeuntum Et Non Rivertentum.” Besides that, it’s not on any of their albums but rather a hidden track on a soundtrack, and hidden before the album begins to boot (you have to rewind nine minutes from when the first track plays in order to hear it). Marshall’s worked with the Australian trio before; in addition to touring with them, guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White backed her up on the third Cat Power album, Moon Pix. But “Great Waves” sounds different from either band’s oeuvre; fuller than Cat Power but largely missing the signature violins of most Dirty Three songs, it represented a shift for the band. Critics had damned the Dirty Three with faint praise, giving 2000’s Whatever You Love, You Are and 2003’s She Has No Strings Apollo high marks but wondering if the standard template would ever change. Would Warren Ellis’s swooning violin always add the flourish to Turner and White’s stirring backdrop?

Cinder is not your typical Dirty Three album. For one, this is easily their most prolific album ever, with a whopping 19 tracks. The band managed this feat by trimming down their songs; no more 13-minute epics. This is an unfortunate move; the Dirty Three have always had a keen sense of dramatic structure, knowing exactly when to draw out a movement, when to quicken the tempo, and where to place the shuddering climax. At an average running time of about four minutes, those luxuries go out the window. But in their place is a new willingness to play around with new ideas, and for the first half of the album it pays off splendidly. Much of the first third of the album is apparently an exercise: how not to sound like the Dirty Three while still being the Dirty Three. “Ever Since” is anchored not by Ellis’s violin but by a mandolin, a sign of things to come. “She Passed Through” doesn’t actually get started until halfway through its three and a half minutes, with the band advancing in fits and starts. The title track is dominated mostly by Turner’s guitar, and is proof that his work can be just as expressive and emotional as Ellis’s. “Cinder” gives way to “Doris,” another track where the violin takes a backseat. It’s also one of the most obvious departures from the band’s traditional sound; while the melodic signature still marks it as a Dirty Three production, an electric guitar and a set of bagpipes (!) provide the instrumental thrust here. Lively and raucous, it shows flashes of a Dirty Three of yesteryear, the Dirty Three that once put together Horse Stories.

The problem with the Three’s abandonment of the long epic is that while they have a lot of good ideas, many of them also sound the same. Combine this with the band’s late-career tendency towards a less aggressive sound, and you have a recipe for slowcore disaster. The latter half of the album isn’t bad; it just leaves less of an impression than the first half. In the context of a whole album, Marshall’s turn on “Great Waves” isn’t quite the revolution it sounded like on its own. And while there are some standout tracks like “It Happened” and “Dream Evie,” the rest of the album dissolves into one long stretch of background music—certainly pleasant, and perfect for a drive through some picturesque eastern European countryside, but not quite up to snuff. It’s still a worthy addition to the Dirty Three collection, at least on par with She Has No Strings Apollo. And if it isn’t quite on par with the dust-ups of Horse Stories or the starry night skies of Whatever You Love, You Are, well. Not many albums are.