Dirty Primitives strike again

A new song by my incredibly talented friends of Dirty Primitives, who seem to invent a new style of music every few months - this one would be Swamp Glam and I love it.

Clean / Dance / Raw / Swamp by Dirty Primitives

Dirty Primitives don't play by the rules - that's true for their music, that's also the case when they share it. So they just released 4 free EPs on their Bandcamp - how cool is that? 

This project not only gives us our share of brutal sweaty blues with plenty of spontaneous raw fuzz explosions and sticky riffs, but uncovers new sides of their talent that didn't appear yet in the studio albums or on stage, ranging from subtle soundscapes with samples and aerial guitars to anthemic dance rock...

Maybe you don't know Dirty Primitives yet, the noisy blues duet from my hometown in northern France? Well, on top on the EPs, here is their last live video, check by yourselves!

Dirty Primitives new EP

I just received Dirty Primitives' new EP and I'm not disappointed at all - their energy and creativity keep up to the standards they set in their first album (reviewed here), and they even go a step further -  their music sounds deeper and more focused to me. 

Here again Dirty Primitives manage to create a coherent sound while proposing very different songs - from the lengthy techno-blues Run Run Run with its abrasive minimal guitar riff supporting big vocals harmonies and dissonant solo guitar exploration, to the illbientesque Hold me and its combination of voice samples and acoustic noises on a slow tempo. These two songs like the others make this EP a manifesto stating that distorted guitar can be much more that just brutal - though they can do that too - but a perfect and sophisticated tool to dig into our emotions.

Because they respect nothing, Dirty Primitives also brilliantly cover Led Zeppelin's Dazed and Confused in a stripped down post-punk way - no more big voice and epic guitar effects and soloing, mostly just droning fuzz and spoken words - until the song shrinks to just one note and one beat - but the right note and the right beat! Much more fitting to my taste than the original to be honest, but hey, it's just me! And you'll also find No Pop Music, their 2013 exuberant tribute to David Bowie's Berlin phase, that was not released on CD so far. 

 You can listen to Dirty Primitives' EP - and buy it - here. And because you need to hear them live, you can contact them through their website to propose concerts - these guys must tour!

Dirty Primitives Go No Pop

Dirty Primitives just released a new single that is quite surprising in many ways - though not betraying the sound we've discovered on their first album. Obviously they don't play by the rules - that's probably why their music is good - and we like it. No Pop Music is a joyful tribute to David Bowie's late "Berlin period", a tongue-in-cheek anti-pop manifesto with a cheerful beat and plenty of heavily effected guitars - otherwise it wouldn't be Dirty Primitives!

There is so much music that is just recycling boring clichés while pretending to be to be sincere and free that the directness of their homage to Bowie is truly rejoicing, and was worth their putting aside their dirty sweaty blues sound for one song (I was told that it was a one-off project). And of course Bowie being the Prince of Thieves, absorbing, processing and rejuvenating all kind of music, is just asking to be looted!

You know what, I'm proud of these guys, they are old timers who've been on stage for over 20 years, playing all kind of crazy music with many bands (I've seen David sawing his guitar next to me while we were disconstructing Prince's Purple Rain - opening for Otomo Yoshihide) and they can create such a cool and catchy song just on a whim, then they put their heads in boxes and share the fun, and it's good.

CD review: Dirty Primitives

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.

a glimpse of the planckaster

My friends from Dirty Primitives are back in studio, at the end of 

this short clip you will  see a few seconds of David B's planckaster...

a video by Dirty Primitives featuring the Plankaster!

This is the first video clip of French band Dirty Primitives, in which you can see the plankaster I built for David B. in action. Quite a catchy song, isn't it? 

Album is due in a few weeks!