Dirty Three Whatever You Love You Are

Following the protracted serenity of 1998’s Ocean Songs, Dirty Three circled back to some of their more climactic tendencies on 2000’s Whatever You Love, You Are. Yet the trio of guitarist Mick Turner, violinist Warren Ellis and drummer Jim White still very much value subtlety over bombast here. Even as the song titles become more flowery—reflecting Ellis’ long and embellished monologues between songs live—the players stick to their primary instruments and invite no guests into the fold. An elegy for friends lost to drug overdoses, “Some Summers They Drop Like Flys” invites us back into the band’s hypnotic, circular arrangements, which find increasing traction toward the finish. Ellis’ mournful violin bowing is multiplied and overlapped, while he also peppers through some plucked notes here and on the following “I Really Should’ve Gone Out Last Night”. As in sync as the three musicians remain, their parts intentionally veer off a shared course on the reeling “Some Things I Just Don’t Want to Know”. Living up to the comforting promise of its title, the closing “Lullaby for Christie” feels like a deliberate conclusion. But the unmistakable centrepiece is “I Offered It Up to the Stars & the Night Sky”, the longest track at almost 14 minutes. Again layering multiple violin lines for dizzying effect at the start, it builds to a riotous peak that sees White hitting the drums (and especially the cymbals) harder than usual as Ellis and Turner court churning distortion. Again, it feels like a moment beamed directly from the band’s cleansing live shows. Dirty Three slowed down somewhat in the decade after this album, which won an ARIA for Best Alternative Release. Ellis began a long string of film scores in collaboration with Nick Cave in the mid-2000s, on top of his prolific work across assorted instruments in The Bad Seeds. And as White got busier drumming for Bill Callahan’s Smog project and Turner spent more time on his painting (which features on every Dirty Three release), the trio naturally saw more and more time pass between each subsequent album. In fact, after 2012’s Toward the Low Sun, it would be a dozen years before the cavernous follow-up Love Changes Everything.