Dirty Three
Ocean Songs

The Dirty Three are a band with an exceptional ability to stir emotions and evoke images in the listener, and this album, a concept-album about the sea, is probably their masterpiece (but I highly recommend also "Horse Stories" and "Whatever you love you are"). The Australian ensemble consists of a typically jazz drum set that creates an open and ever-evolving rhythm; a rhythmic guitar that is never intrusive and mainly acts as a counterpoint to the violin "voice" that, sometimes soothing sometimes tempestuous, is the true protagonist of Ocean Songs.

Traditionally, we should talk about this album by labeling it as belonging to the post-rock trend, but in this case, it seems really reductive and somewhat misleading. Instead, we are witnessing an impressionist work, where the Dirty Three have managed to sublimate both the delicate sensations felt at sunset while contemplating a deserted beach caressed by wind and waves, and the arcane and overwhelming energies of the abyss.

The band manages to make the musical influences running through the album its own, reinventing and molding them with the scent of salt, the colors of memory, and the roar of the "marine womb."

The jazz matrix can be found in the airy opener “Sirena” and in the conclusive and conciliatory “Ends of the Earth” (the ideal end of the journey), but there are also ambient reminiscences where electronics are erased and replaced by the three instruments that give life to the delicate and evocative “Backward Voyager” and “Black Tide,” the latter a true experiment in mimicking marine sounds interpreted by drums, guitar, and violin.

But it is in the “emotional streams of consciousness” that the band gives its best: the piercing melancholy of “The Restless Wave”; the sudden “burst of lights” (after a beginning where the instruments seem to struggle to tune) of “Desert Shore”; “Last Horse on the Sand” where a caressing remoteness hovers over a martial rhythm of percussion; the sinuous “Sea Above, Sky Below” with the violin distilling a melody that seems like a warm potion slowly entering the veins.

In all these pieces, as already mentioned, the violin is the true deus ex machina: sometimes gently enveloping our senses, at other times igniting them with vigorous marine fluidity.

The masterpieces within the masterpiece are the two long suite “Authentic Celestial Music” and “Deep Waters”. The former is a true ascensional journey toward the starry sky aboard a raft in the middle of the sea; the progressive crescendo seems like the rising of a giant wave upon which we can almost touch the cosmos and the range of shades produced by the violin reaches prodigious heights here. The latter seems like an excursion into the depths where we can magically breathe and delve: in this piece, the crescendo is joyous and it feels like dancing in the marine depths among colorful corals and fish.

For the writer, one of the masterpieces of the '90s.