Dirty Rotten Imbeciles – D.R.I. Live – Review

Dirty Rotten Imbeciles

D.R.I. Live (Rotten)
by Joe Hacking

All these new, candy-assed “neo-punk” bands have resurrected the punk/hardcore beast without its soul. Where’s the anger? The cathartic, high-speed runs? Punk/hardcore used to be about releasing your frustrations with some pissed-off band and a bunch of your fellow pissed-off miscreants. Now it’s about happy, meandering bass lines and fake British accents.

D.R.I. began when the memory of punk angst was still fresh in the minds of Young America. They started out in Texas as a bunch of hardcore hack rockers back in ’83, playing fast and angry to hide their half-baked musical skills. But after realizing that there was a market for their brand of frustration exchange, they began to improve their skills on the stages of sleazy dive bars across the planet. They achieved the notoriety and fan base that has made them one of the last of the hardcore bands to survive into the present day.

D.R.I. Live, recorded entirely live and unedited, captures the raw power of D.R.I. live at the Hollywood Palladium in November of ’92. For D.R.I. fans, this album will be a treat, but even if you know very little of the band’s material, or none at all, it’s a good re-introduction or first time experience. The band pulls off some of the trickiest musical acrobatics imaginable on this sampling of their live sound. Driven by drummer Rob Rampy, bassist John Menor’s frantic pluckings provide low-end grunt for Spike Cassidy’s hectic guitar and Kurt Brecht’s disenfranchised vocals. Sure, it lacks the hurtling bodies, musclebound bouncers, stagedivers, stale beer, cigarette smoke, and stage antics of the actual live show, but you get the well-written lyrics to all the songs and some cool pictures of the band.

D.R.I. Live shows that the hardcore beast, and D.R.I., still live and breathe despite the watered-down imitators.