Dwarves
Come Clean (Epitaph)
by Brian Varney
Like seemingly everything new, I hated this the first time I heard it. To tell the truth, I was never crazy about the Dwarves‘ last album, Young and Good-Looking, either. Despite the hosannas from lots of people whose opinions I respect, the kinder, gentler Dwarves represented therein just didn’t cut the mustard for me. Sure, there were good songs, but so what? There was nothing as brilliant as any single cut from their landmark Blood Guts & Pussy album. “The glory days,” I sadly told myself, “are over.”
And that’s kinda how I reacted to Come Clean the first couple of times through. Although there are still fine moments to be had, this sounds like a neutered version of the band I used to love. Or so I thought. What the Dwarves have done on these last two albums is the same thing Monster Magnet did with their latest album, Powertrip, which is to remove the more extreme elements from their sound in an effort to make their “thing” more palatable to a larger group of people. What this has also done, perhaps unintentionally, is to move both bands closer to their musical roots which, in Monster Magnet’s case, is late ’60s/early ’70s punk rock and stripped-down hard rock. In the case of the Dwarves, it’s two and a half minute AM pop songs. Even though Blood Guts & Pussy‘s 12 songs lasted 13 minutes and boasted song titles like “Motherfucker,” “Skin Poppin’ Slut,” and “Let’s Fuck,” the songs were classic pop at heart. Now that they’ve toned down the shock value and slowed the tempos a bit, their pop roots are much more apparent. As a result, you get songs like “Over You,” whose annoyingly techno-flavored verses give way to a stunning pop chorus, and “Better Be Women,” a breathtaking 2:30 pop stunner guaranteed to inspire jealousy in power pop bands everywhere. When he wants to, Dwarves frontman Blag Dahlia can write a heartbreakingly perfect pop song.
Granted, this album’s splatter-gun attack is far from perfect. For every great song like “Accelerator” (which nicks the intro to Turbonegro’s “Rendezvous With Anus”), there are punk clunkers like “River City Rapist” and “I Want You to Die,” which have all of the speed of Blood Guts & Pussy with none of the songcraft, or “Act Like You Know” and its bafflingly inappropriate cookie-monster death metal vocals. Some of the experimentation works, but most of it doesn’t. When the band sticks to pop songs, it works more often than not. When they decide to try other stuff, all bets are off.
(www.epitaph.com)
