BELLA1597 // 28 June 2024

Emerging once again from the unending waves crashing upon our fragile time-craft (adrift on the eternal ocean and taking on water), Dirty Three are a) back, b) tangled in seaweed, rank with saltwater and possessed of three rather ominous thousand-mile stares (at least!), and c) not wasting another minute — as nothing is guaranteed. For their first album in over a decade (yep, it’s been twelve years since 2012’s Toward the Low Sun), they flew in, got together and started playing. End of story. What else is there to say or do but that? Music is their language, their true love; they never stop listening. And like the label says, Love Changes Everything. 

The Dirty Three (Warren Ellis, Mick Turner and Jim White) formed in Melbourne in 1992, to play with guitar, drums and violin or viola; within a couple years, they’d broken out of Australia and gone global. Over the next ten years, they toured over and over the planet, cut seven albums along the way, and de-coupled themselves to piece together many other fruitful collaborations with myriad esteemed talents (Nick Cave, Cat Power, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, PJ Harvey, Nina Nastasia). Over the past 20 years, they’ve gotten together a few times to renew vows, rev the engines, play some shows, or make an album. Like now, with Love Changes Everything, a record bubbling up with the clarity of just-struck spring water — a translucence that gives way to muddy gushes of distortion, dirty guitar, smears of violin, and drums at times pounded beyond the microphones’ ability to receive.