Dirty on Purpose - Hallelujah Sirens

General Ratings:

Rating: 8
Breadth of Appeal: 5
Consistency of Quality: 7

RIYL: Broken Social Scene, Yo La Tengo, The Moon and Antarctica-era Modest Mouse

Further Listening: The Jealous Girlfriends, Lilys’ Eccsame the Photon Band, Venice is Sinking

Place of Origin: Brooklyn, NY

Sound/Instrument List: Electric and Acoustic Guitars, Bass, Drums, Male and Female Lead Vocals, Male and Female Backup Vocals, Keyboard, Trumpet, Strings

Mood Tones: This is a long drive for someone with everything to think about. Late night driving, but lonelier than this.

Song Highlights: Light Pollution, Car No-Driver, Your Summer Dress

Favorite Lyrics:

“The lake effect kept us in bed. /
The lake effect left us with cigarette sores, /
bruises and scars up my back and arms, /
and coughs that don’t quit.” (from “Lake Effect”)

“My ears are microphones, /
my eyes, they are cameras.” (from “Car No-Driver”)

“We’re all trying to score, /
but not trying too hard.” (from “Fake Lakes”)

Further Thoughts:

Brooklyn four-piece Dirty on Purpose came together from 2002 to 2008 for three EPs and one full length. The excellent Sleep Late for a Better Tomorrow came before the album, the still strong Like Bees and weaker, digital only (still available for free here) Dead Volcanoes after. (I think there was also an initial self-titled, self-released EP, but if so, it’s none-too-easy to find.) Though not as obviously as with Broken Social Scene, the clearest touchstone, or The Jealous Girlfriends, Dirty on Purpose feels like a collective, sharing vocal duties and emphasizing each member’s playing in turn through the dense production and careful mixing of the songs.

Production is much of the story here. If you worship at the altars of Loveless, OK Computer, and You Forgot It in People, then you know the pleasures of production: perfectly controlled reverb, expert fading, attention to the left and right channel, levels carefully altered for fills and breaks when the spotlight shifts. A wall of sound to be sure, but a wall that only reveals itself more and more as carefully crafted as it’s studied and scrutinized, especially through the lens of headphones (to mix a metaphor). Which isn’t to say it’s just a matter of production and mixing. As is often the case, such boardwork comes hand in hand with a certain kind of songwriting, where the traditional verse-chorus structure gives way to extended intros and outros, long fills and breaks (not to be confused with solos), multiple bridges, instrumentals, dirge, vamping, headnodding, shoegazing, emotional arcing ... you get the idea. But, as with Radiohead and Nigel Goodrich or Broken Social Scene and Dave Newfeld, Dirty on Purpose is the kind of band, if they had gotten bigger and lasted longer, that one imagines could have seriously and unsentimentally said things about their producer being a de facto fifth member.

Opener “No Radio” gives a nod to Stereolab, “Summer Dress” Yo La Tengo, “Lake Effect” Low perhaps, others Broken Social Scene and Modest Mouse. The album is neatly cut in half by the extended intro (separately tracked, but not titled) for “Always Looking,” a moment of lovely, quiet guitar work that reminds me of Jon Brion’s score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, bittersweet music if ever there was. None of the influences are mimicked or too transparent, though. Rather, one can see much of the best music of the last decades understood, ingested, metabolized, and then recreated by Dirty on Purpose as all their own, guitars churning, heads nodding, feet tapping, things-in-chest soaring.

Notably, there’s a sustained interplay of male and female vocals, both lead and background in turn, in their sound. By the time of Hallelujah Sirens, there wasn’t a regular female group member, though. Founding member Erika Forster features prominently (and excellently) on Sleep Late for a Better Tomorrow, but left the band, and the album relies instead on guests Holly Miranda and anti-folker Jaymay. (The otherwise unremarkable video for "Light Pollution" features a charming pan up to Jaymay, sitting in the rafters and swinging her feet, for her guest vocal part.) Anyway, both hold their own, but Forster was better, one has to admit, on that first EP (check out especially “All New Friends,” where she’s quite Emily Haines-ish). She’s now part of the the winningly (is this where people use the word "fetchingly"?) cute Au Revoir Simone.

Lyrically, there’s not all that much that’s memorable here, but that’s only fitting. Indie pop needs its colorful characters and cute stories, art prog. its abstract but memorable images, and so forth, but the post-shoegaze niche Dirty on Purpose works in has always been about mapping out a certain landscape of mood. The vocals are pretty low in the mix and uncrisply half-swallowed/mumbled, serving more as another instrument than carriers of meaning--one obviously capable of the subtle changes in, well, voicing, that trace mood above all else. As often as not, the melody is carried by the guitars or bass, or each in turn as they're pulled to the fore of the mix, then faded back in. So the words here are what one would expect--invocations of technology and geography, weather as fortune telling, quasi-anthemic sloganeering--but one should emphasize exactly that those expectations are satisfied, not disappointed. Everything in its right place, as someone once said.