Dirty Three, Toward The Low Sun

By J Howell

It somehow doesn’t feel like it, but Toward The Low Sun marks the first proper full-length from Dirty Three in seven years, as well as the Australian trio’s first record for Drag City. For better or worse, it may be exactly what fans of the band were expecting: It sounds . . . well, pretty much exactly like a Dirty Three record—any Dirty Three record. After such a long wait though, it’s surprising how predictable a record it is. While there’s no denying that Toward The Low Sun is an achingly beautiful piece of work, it doesn’t expand much on the band’s aesthetic or break any particularly new ground for them.

Again, whether that’s a good thing or not is entirely up to the listener. For those enamored of the dreamy-yet-visceral ebb and flow the band traffics in, it’s mostly comforting. For those fans who have followed the three Aussies’ adventures with other collaborators—such as Grinderman and the Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey, Cat Power, and Will Oldham—it may be a little puzzling that more outside influences haven’t seemed to have seeped in. While the members have displayed prodigious adaptability individually, in the context of Dirty Three, the band hasn’t elaborated much on the tempestuous beauty that they’ve always been known for.

The first couple of tracks, especially the opening “Furnace Skies,” are somewhat different from the bulk of their prior work. In particular, Warren Ellis’s violin and Jim White’s drumming take on a noisier, more frantic, almost “jammy” aspect that’s enjoyable enough, but frankly maybe just a little too loose for my taste. By a third of the way through, Toward The Low Sun finds it way into the trademark Dirty Three album framework: lovely, almost hypnotic, but visceral and cohesive to the point that it feels more like one piece of music with several movements than “songs” on an album, much like Ocean Songs, the band’s 1998 masterpiece.

Toward The Low Sun is much too good a record to be described as stale or uninspired, but it may be ever-so-slightly disappointing to some fans that the band seems to have played it relatively safe throughout the nine tracks here. That said, those same fans will still love it, as nobody else quite does what Dirty Three do, and nobody could do it better.

Toward The Low Sun was released by Drag City on February 28 and can be purchased from the label website.