Dirt Music – Lion City (Glitterbeat)

Former Walkabouts man Chris Eckman, whose highly introspective and melancholic songs won a cult following – helped by the fact they were on Sub Pop when label mates Nirvana exploded globally – has been active in African music since the 80s, and along with veteran indie rocker Chris Brokaw and Australian Hugo Race, an original member of The Bad Seeds, and leader of the True Spirit band, and many guests singers and musicians mainly from Mali and beyond (including Samba Toure, MC Jazz, Senegal’s Ibrahima Douf, and members of both Super II andTamikrest) Dirt Music was formed with the intent of ‘getting their hands dirty’. Borrowing their name from Tim Winton’s Dirt Music novel, they have continuously strived to deny the music the cleanliness of a modern sheen and the supposed digital utopia of the 21st century.

The band’s rock’n’roll beginnings evolved to take in African music, particularly the sounds and styles of Mali, eventually amalgamating that country’s expansive, evocative, and spiritual tones and textures into an overall sound that beautifully marries western and African traditions, a unique cinematic afro-rock.

The tracks that make up Dirt Music were recorded at the same time, at the same place (in Mali’s capital Bamako) and with the same backing band, The Ben Zabo Band, as those that eventually found their way on to the ‘Troubles’ album which was released to much acclaim last year.

But the mood is a little more contemplative here, more sombre, albeit still politically charged. Throughout, the rich atmospherics make themselves heard, an often errie sound made so via shimmering or echoing guitars, and dub-like spaciousness, for instance on the ambient dub of Red Dust. In other places, lead singer Eckman has that hushed Roger Waters and Matt Johnson style of stinging, if much less menacing, for instance on the gently haunting ‘Movin’ Careful’.

‘Lion City’ is an album of two halves; the more upbeat African songs occasionally interlope on the generally trancey, atmospheric desert dub-blues textures, but throughout the guitars are used in multifarious ways to imbibe the music with a haunting, almost psychedelic feel. ‘Starlight Club’ manages to marry the two stands , creating an almost Can (circa ‘Tago Mago’) soundscape, this short instrumental track feeling like a jam session, which is what much of what Dirt Music is essentially made up of. Then there’s ‘Blind City’, one of the more rockier tracks, a fusion of post-punk guitars and African funk, with faint echoes of Talking Heads.

A remarkable album from a remarkable band; egalitarian in approach, borderless and communal in spirit, and despite the overarching melancholy, hopeful and optimistic in the face of the often desperate and dire situations that have recently engulfed Mali and many of its neighbours.

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