The Dirtbombs have your earssurrounded

Thu 14th Feb, 2008 in International News

Direct from Detroit, USA The Dirtbombs explode from your speakers with their new album We Have You Surrounded, due out on Infidelity Records in Australia on February 22, and return to Australian shores for a blistering set of gigs during their February/March Tour.

We Have You Surrounded is the first full-length album of new material from The Dirtbombs since 2003’s pivotal Dangerous Magical Noise and they already have four non-album singles slated for release in 2008. This is their fifth full length album and features a bonus hidden track of a cover of INXS’ ‘Need You Tonight’.

To celebrate the release of We Have You Surrounded The Dirtbombs come to Australia in February/March for what will be no doubt be a series of Off-The-Richter, intense, garage-rock/soul infused shows, guaranteed to make your hips swing.

We Have You Surrounded is an album broadly focused on the theme of urban paranoia. Whether it’s via the straight-forward grime rock of ‘I Hear the Sirens’, the bleak, martial outlook conveyed in covering Dead Moon’s 1992 classic ‘Fire in the Western World’ or the wistful, Judgment Day, album-closer ‘La Fin du Monde’ the record, coupled with artwork and lettering by Emmy-Award winning artist Gary Panter, takes on Armageddon with all the abandon of a conspiracy theorist living off-the-grid.

The unarguable centerpiece of the disc is the song ‘Leopardman at C&A’. With lyrics by famed graphic novelist Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Watchmen) and intended for seminal goth pioneers Bauhaus, lead Dirtbomb Mick Collins put music to the words and the end result is a beautiful pairing of strong, vibrant post-apocalyptic prose and propulsive, thunderous punk rock.

References to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and the theoretical concept of “race to the bottom” pepper the disc while the music is standard Dirtbombs fare: that is, equal doses of high-energy Detroit rock and roll paired with Collins’ vibrant, soulful vocals that combine to form what Time Out magazine has called “full-tilt garage-reared genius.”