If you follow this blog you already heard of Dirty Primitives - the band's guitarist is a old friend and collaborator of mines, and I built the planckaster for him. I received their first CD a few days ago and I've been happily listening to it several times, and enjoy its many qualities.
It is great to listen to fuzzy guitar-based music that is not just an accumulation of clichés or a laborious effort to sound like the great ancients of some rock golden age. Don't get me wrong, Dirty Primitives' music is rooted in blues - the harsh kind -, but they take it, together with the listeners, somewhere else. The references that come to mind are Captain Beefheart, the Gun Club, John Spencer or the Drones, but Dirty Primitives sound more southern and more cosmopolitan, if you see what I mean...
That's actually what I like in this album, that it constantly mixes contradictory things - dirty blues sounds and avant-garde textures, raging riffs and dissonant solos, ballads and noisy walls of sounds, hypnotic beats and elaborated arrangements, banjo and mellotron (there are not only guitars)... It's both simple and elaborate, unpretentious and ambitious, raw and elegant - like all music should be! The two guitars are truly complementary (I pay attention to this since I read Keith Richards' book and his description of dual guitars composition), and the voice is more elaborated than you'd expect for this kind of music, sometimes playing with complex harmonies and effects - I like this better that the emotional roughness you're supposed to display in 'authentic' rock or blues...
I hope that this band will find the audience it deserves, what they do is rare and valuable.
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