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Rating: "The Dirt Of Luck" ('95), the first full-length for the Boston band after the debut EP "Pirate Prude" from the previous year: a handful of uneasy lullabies, seated on a floor of slow, yet hard and pointed rhythms like stones. Twelve gems made of indie pop tranquility, easy listening melodies, roughness, and guitar and bass abrasions on the verge of noise.
From the debut record, the madness, the schizophrenia during recording, and the deconstruction of the song form are abandoned. What remains is the taste for the "daring" juxtaposition of sounds and instruments, overdubs, noisy, harsh, and hard rhythms and distortions.
Thus, it happens to encounter childish melodies and keyboard jingles, little more than the lullabies of a music box, supported by simple guitar lines, stumbling on the distortion pedal ("Silver Angel"), nursery rhymes that prelude sudden openings and crackles of guitars a là Breeders ("Pat's Trick"). Explosions of feedback and tribal timpani resonating that astonish and surprise in their evocation of the best My Bloody Valentine, before twisting and wrapping around a siren-guitar to become hypnotic, hallucinatory, almost psychedelic ("Baby's Going Underground"). And again, wonky melodies, stifled at birth by what seems to be the inexorable ticking of an alarm clock, the annoying ticking of a clock ("Comet #9"), a horror film piano interlude ("Skeleton") and a pop-oriental synth, emerging from a roundabout in the midst of a grunge folk-festival ("Superball").
When you finally think you've gotten used to all those edges, to the harmonious intertwining of sounds and noise, to that almost physical sensation of "friction" emanating from Ash Bowie's bass ("Medusa"), you find yourself hearing a forgotten gem in the double bottom of some of the best Pavement's treasure chest, made of simple arpeggios and delicate slide guitars that are content to remain in the background ("Honeycomb").
Everywhere, laid on the noise, dancing on the jingles, comfortable among the din, there's a voice (Mary Timony) that seems to want to cradle the distortions: sweet and restless, often little more than a lullaby, never truly aggressive, as if Kim Deal, Kim Gordon, and J. Mascis (?) found themselves having to share the same vocal cords, the same melancholy.
The final result resembles a bit of a mishmash of genres, sounds, and colors: indie, pop, noise, nursery rhymes, and clamor. A continuous overlapping of melodic lines and not, but with the ability and strength to create, despite its heterogeneity, a strange example of harmony, a dreamy atmosphere with blurred contours, like a ballerina dancing on tiptoe on shards of glass, in a sort of precarious balance of experimentalism and pop catchiness, roughness and sonic sweetness.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
05 Medusa (03:10)
Black angel, you're my centerfold
Though you're two years old, your love is so bold
My heart is so cold
My heart is so cold
Come and get me, we'll fly
On your wings through the thunderstorm sky
Kiss me, oh my
Little kiss of death and things that die
The wings of a dragonfly
The kiss of a butterfly
Sing alleluia on high
Sing alleluia on high
Come and get me we'll fly
On your wings through the thunderstorm sky
Kiss me, ah
Little kiss of death and things that die
The kiss of a rattlesnake
The body of a black lake
Sing a lullaby to wake me
A lullaby to wake me
Come and get me we'll fly
On your wings through the thunderstorm sky
Kiss me, oh my
Little kiss of death and things that die
08 Superball (02:35)
A glass eye I use to spy.
Little tiny teeth that tell a golden lie.
My feet are small, I'm not that tall.
I'll tell you the truth, but really not at all.
I'm small like a superball, throw me at the wall
I'm fragile like an eggshell, I'm mad as hell.
My teeth are gold, I'm not that old.
I would tell you the truth, but I'm not that bold.
Hook me with your hand, my mouth is full of sand.
Everything I say ends with and.
I'm small like a superball, throw me up at the wall
I'm fragile like an eggshell, I'm mad as hell.
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