Dirty Three: Love Changes Everything

Watching various live footage from their recent Australian tour just highlighted what most people already know: Dirty Three are the best live band on the planet.

It’s a celebration. A unique concoction of feral energy and hysteria, and it’s brought about by three musicians who are so singular and primal from one another that their music is the quintessential perfect storm.

Warren Ellis, a menace of the mystique, flailing around on violin as he tackles the rambling complexities of Mick Turner’s guitar. Then there’s Jim White, whose work from behind the drumkit is worth the price of admission alone. It’s all intrinsically linked in an inexplicable way that lightening is caught in a bottle. 

12 years since their last release, Toward the Low Sun, the members of Dirty Three have been busy conquering other parts of the creative landscape. Ellis, primarily as right-hand man to Nick Cave and Bad Seeds, while Turner has released two excellent albums alongside Helen Franzmann as Mess Esque. Meanwhile, White has jumped in tour buses all around the world and from one recording studio to the next, immersed in collaboration with the likes of Gareth Liddiard, Chris Abrahams, Marisa Anderson and, most recently, Steve Gunn with his new side hustle, Beings.

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In the world of the Dirty Three, despite all living in different parts of the world, time has opened up for Ellis, Turner and White to reconvene and resume the project’s undeniable majesty. And the result is Love Changes Everything; an album that is like trying to capture a dream you’ve spent a lifetime chasing. It’s impossible, because like that very dream, the Dirty Three’s beautiful noise shifts and morphs with different meaning every time you’re met with its grace. It ultimately makes them the soundtrack to life itself.

While Love Changes Everything is very much the sum of its parts the way all Dirty Three releases shake out, it still sees the trio cover new ground. The opening moments of Love Changes Everything I sees Ellis, Turner and White begin with a drone that is like a howl from the void that could be mistaken for a Sunn O))) soundcheck. Despite these initial moments of uncertainty, things slowly unravel with familiarity; Turner’s tangled, plucky guitar, Ellis’ lurching strings and White’s flashes from behind the kit explode with a Neil Young-inspired rumble of noise.

The piano-led Love Changes Everything II takes parts of Ellis’ emotive sound sculptures that underpinned Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen, and merging these sketches with the Dirty Three’s foundational sound, not only does call upon the finest moments of She Has No Strings Apollo, it eclipses them. Again, it’s another clear indication of the Dirty Three progressing from preceding records whilst still maintaining their core sound.

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Again, the piano is the focal point on Love Changes Everything III. Ellis’ droning echoes, White’s minimalist percussion and Turner’s meandering riffs creating the staple Dirty Three lament devised to melt the heart. Unlike Love Changes Everything V, which possesses a nervous energy that thrums with catch-and-release tension that feels like an endorphin rush. Improvisation that stretches to the ends of the earth in search of that magic moment, and here the Dirty Three find it.

It’s a beautiful lead in to the curtain call, Love Changes Everything VI. Stringed loops that resonate as Ellis’ piano creates a doom-laden backdrop likened to fellow countrymen, The Necks. However, it’s Turner’s melodic noodling that brings you back into familiar realms, and alongside White’s stirring percussion, the trio orchestrate a rolling wave sound that cuts you adrift. This, indeed, a new variation of ocean song.  

It’s the synergy that makes the Dirty Three what they are. Meandering interplay that eventually hits a frequency that can only be found via an unspoken telepathy between its architects. Together, Ellis, Turner and White possess an energy like nothing else, and Love Changes Everything is further evidence.

Whether some believe the Dirty Three’s first new music in over a decade will hold up to their previous landmarks is really here nor there. What’s most important is that there is only one band in the world that sounds like the Dirty Three and evokes the same emotional response as the Dirty Three. It’s the Dirty Three. And that alone is cause for celebration.

Love Changes Everything is out now via Bella Union / Drag City. Purchase from Bandcamp.