Dirty Three

Horse Stories (Touch and Go)
by Sheril Stanford

Instrumentals all, these songs are evocative of the most elemental of life’s offerings: birth and death, love and loss, hope and despair, loneliness and longing, growth and decay. To call it mood music would be deceptive, but moody it is, beautiful and poignant. Dirty Three is an Australian band comprised of violin, guitar, keyboards and percussion, but the auditory picture that information paints really has nothing to do with much of the music you’ll hear on this disc. Dirty Three’s creations are fiercly original and almost painfully lovely. Horse Stories is a musical portrayal of the desolation, hope and despair of say, a Steinbeck novel. Providing some relief from the intensity of the other tracks, two songs step outside this framework: “Warren’s Lament,” a radical departure in style from the other cuts on Horse Stories, is a short blast of fuzz and feedback, and “I Remember a Time When Once You Used to Love Me” is a cover of a Greek folk song.