The Retro Valley: Dirty Three - Sue’s Last Ride (1996, Touch and Go)
I’ve written about Mogwai before, and I still think it would be nice if bands found a way to adapt the sounds of post-rock, or at least the good parts of post-rock, for a post-millennial age. There’s a looseness in the best acts, an organic kind of swing and sway and stagger, that you tend not to find in today’s rigidly quantized ProTools / Garageband recordings. The power and physicality conveyed by most current music (and I’ll be talking about this more elsewhere) is close and present, either individually present and in-your-face like Sleigh Bells or Beyonce, or the sort of collective-voice-of-the-mob of Arcade Fire. Post-rock, though, always seemed big in an almost geologic sense, expansive and echoing rather than aggressive and teeming, like a singular monster welling up from the lake ahead of you. If Arcade Fire is the sound of being inside a stampede, Dirty Three is the sound of watching it from a mesa in the distance.
Perhaps to the unhappiness of their recipients, I almost always ended my mixtapes with “Sue’s Last Ride” for quite a while. It spoke to some inner impulse that seemed transcendent but was maybe just frustrated. It was the same sort of resonance I got from (eep) Tori Amos, but without the obviously embarrassing lyrics. Maybe, like “Waiting Room,” it described musically a method of organization, and if “Waiting Room” speaks to me more now, the structure of “Sue’s Last Ride” was how I did things back then: starting haphazardly, without any real plan, surging forward before breaking down and falling back into disarray, then finally through trial and error coming together in a nearly out-of-control charge. If Fugazi is about control, I like that Dirty Three is about losing control. It’s the same impulse than animated early-00s rock, and which is mainly gone from the scene today.
