Magic Dirt - Beast

Wed 22nd Aug, 2007 in Music Reviews

Has good old fashioned rock and roll had its last hurrah? Has the recent wave of derivative rock single-handedly erased any hankering we had for those discordant sounds? Or am I the only one who suffers an apoplexy when yet another band attempts to reappraise its rock roots?

Whatever the case may be, Magic Dirt have managed to corral rock’s recalcitrant arse and have brought it back for yet one more beating. Cue their latest release Beast , a self indulgent excursion into one chord noise rock. It’s like flogging a dead horse. Only, if the horse were alive and offered respite in exchange for listening to this album it would vehemently ask for another beating. Beast makes beatings feel so good.

Now, come close. Closer. There is something I will divulge that I loathe to make known. Sometimes, believe it or not, I can be wrong. On the rarest of occasions I can even swallow my pride and admit it. So, to avoid the bitter task of having to eat my words, let’s scratch the above introduction and start again.

Perhaps Magic Dirt’s career needs to be compartmentalised. Post Young and Full of the Devil. Pre Beast. Whatever lies within is null and void. That was the time they claimed ownership of a bland, cutesy pop oriented approximation of rock that had rightly earned them the epithet of this country’s most overrated band (despite the fact they were fronted by one Australia’s most dynamic female vocalists). Ever since they disgorged the radio friendly What Are Rock Stars Doing Today? their oeuvre has been a slap dash amalgamation of three parts banality and one part satisfactory pop-rock which was palatable solely because we knew where they came from and where they could’ve been.

That was then. Things are considerably different now. Guitarist and founding member Daniel Herring has returned to beef up their sound on a couple of tracks and they’re all the better for it. Released concurrently with Roky’s Room, Beast is their attempt at re-asserting themselves as something more than ephemeral space filler. This time round it’s more killer than filler and a fitting atonement for their past musical transgressions. Maybe it’s time for the misdeeds of their past to be swiftly buried. Never to be resurrected again. Ever.

It heralds a return to the distorted rock they previously espoused but it’s a little bit more boisterous, certainly a lot more dissonant and teeming with enough attitude to make up for their past failings. It could have too easily degenerated into a generic melange of noise and grating yowls, and even though at times it teeters precariously close to it, there are glimmers of great rock songs just waiting to be polished.

The incursion begins with the one chord drone of Horror Me which sets the album’s primal tone with an oppressively moody intro that descends into a jarring meld of grating guitars and wailing vocals barely audible above the magnificent din. Bring Me the Head of… sounds like Adalita has finally blown the dust motes off her Cramps vinyl. It wavers between great ballsy rock and a tempered DIY American underground punk that runs at breakneck speed into a raucous chorus which would set the toes of even their most fervent detractors tapping.

Adalita has aptly described these songs as “No fuckin’ around, no layers, no harmonies, no tambourines. No fuckin’ anything!”, and it’s precisely this unadulterated, rough-hewn sound that makes Beast so appealing. It’s there in the sombre guitars and caustic rhetoric of Don’t Panic. Adalita launches into a provocative spoken world vocal amidst a swirl of guitars and whilst it would be easy to make comparisons to say, Patti Smith, any attempt would flounder. It stands up well on its own.

The ominous Hung starts with the repetitive intone of a guitar which sounds like the chime of a clock. Adalita continues to deliver her diatribe in that hypnotic atonal snarl. “I’m not faithful or religious, you can count on me I did this,” she exhorts in a guttural vocal that has the elongated cadence of a preacher. There’s guitars. Lots of them. The song chops and changes between the maelstrom of guitars and the disconnected vocal backed up by the protracted strum of that one incessant chord.

The one nagging flaw which overshadows this album is that it feels a little too self-indulgent at times. Songs are expansive efforts which all too easily vacillate between a dark and gritty old school rock and an affected devolution towards formless noise and obscure lyrics. Song writing is still not their strong point. The words are woeful. As Adalita harps on about ‘snakes in stables’ and ‘coming to take your soul’ on Hung it sounds as if she’s pilfered her lines from the dictionary of hackneyed rock rhymes. A band of this calibre should know better.

There’s no doubt that they’re at their best when touting their raw and unstructured brand of rock rather than aping traditional rock forms. That’s old hat. Any monkey in possession of a guitar can do that these days. The more I listen to this album the more I prune the incendiary statements from my review. This is an animal that needs to grow on you. Those with fortitude and patience will be rewarded. There is no doubt that it could’ve been better, it should’ve been better, but they’ve managed to craft an album that signals a return to an abrasive rock based musical credo that does them more justice than the quasi pulp rock of their past.

They say it’s always the journey that counts in any undertaking, never the destination, but in this case it doesn’t really matter anymore how Magic Dirt made their way as long as they got here in the end. As I write these words I spy a post-it note stuck to my computer. The words of Patti Smith have never seemed more pertinent: “When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock ‘n’ roll was asleep.” Magic Dirt are well on their way to waking Aussie rock from its slumber and you can be sure as hell that this time there’ll be no ‘fuckin’ around’.