Dirty Three, Three Leg Torso, Nate Denver’s Neck
Crystal Ballroom
May 2, 9 p.m.
All ages, $12
Writing about Dirty Three, I may as well be writing about the ocean. Or maybe the desert. It seems there should be a great difference between the two, but with Dirty Three it is hard to tell. The group hails from Melbourne, Australia, which provides both landscapes in equal intensity, and both seem to come through in the trio’s music.
The drumming, courtesy of Jim White, is definitely coastal as it rolls over, gently, slowly building on itself, before crashing down in a triumphant wave. As a listener, you stand at shore, waiting for the water to lap over your toes. With the climax of every cycle, however, there is a pull toward the water even stronger than the push of the wave against your body.
Sometimes the tide is out, as it was during 2000’s Whatever You Love, You Are, which required the listener to move farther toward the horizon in order to reach the sound. And sometimes the tide is in, as it was for 1996’s Horse Stories, where you could have stepped farther and farther away and the waves would still manage to find you and pull you back toward the water.
Let us not forget, though, that we have only touched on one-third of the band.
Languid and easy, the guitar can be the sea shells and sparkling sediment that washes up atop the waves – only sometimes it goes much further, forming huge structures of jagged rock that will remain once the waters have dried up and will still be there when the water comes crashing back through the desert, in who knows how many years, and lie unseen beneath the surface, still holding its surreal structure.
The guitar is all of the life that no one sees, hermit crabs evicted from their shells, seeking new surroundings in the submerged world. Mick Turner’s playing is proof that undersea life revolves around relationships as complex as our own and as emotionally trying as they are simple and natural.
The conclusion here is that the desert is the ocean and, with music as epic as it is immediately gratifying, Dirty Three imitates both landscapes, painstakingly describing the desert, grain by grain, before revealing that it actually lies beneath thousands of feet of water, which, as a song progresses, slowly dries up and eventually returns, flooding the speakers and covering the structures, which, undoubtedly, remain intact, though unseen.
Still, that is only two-thirds of the band.
The violin is coming from somewhere else entirely. Warren Ellis’ delicate, melodic strains trace a simple design of moonlight upon the lapping waves and are appreciated as artful embellishment until the tide rolls in and it is apparent that the gentle moonlight is actually the guiding force of the whole system. What had been felt as a strain becomes a yearning and grows to be a force so powerful that you understand its complete control over the physical world. It pulls you into the water, yet encloses you in a safe place, where you can feel the waves bursting around you but know that you are protected: safe, warm and dry.