We Versus the Shark never seem to want to do things the easy way. Their songs aren't so much played as they are choked within an inch of their life, twitching with unpredictable time signatures and knotty structures, filled with copious and complicated guitar work that exhausts both band and listener, and with vocals that are varying degrees of desperate. If genre tags are your thing, the band doesn't think spazz-rock is spazzy enough.
Yet they've hovered close to moments of poignancy and relative quietude on the edges of their perpetual stampede, enough to imply that they might use their all their readily apparent ability towards more discernibly pop ends. Not this time, however: Dirty Versions was mostly recorded live over two days, and it pushes all those aforementioned proclivities as far as they'll go. It's a portrait of the band as they are, and it's more like a blurry Polaroid than a Sears family photo.
"Hello Blood" begins at a sprint, with sudden stops and starts punctuated by frantic guitar soloing, but it falls into a brief moment of vocal harmony buoyed by the band stamping down a 4/4 rhythm in an unexpected jolt of melody. From there, it's all loopy guitar lines, distorted, galloping bass, and rhythms that brake for no one. By the time they take a breath with the slow, droning notes of keyboard that open the fifth track "Dogs", it seems like it was a race to get there. From there, Dirty Versions offers slightly different flavors of frantic, from the lurching "I Am a Caffeinated Corpse" and its burping keyboards to the chunky chords and thick paranoia of "Gothic Y'all", to trading licks over the bridge of "Keep It Wolf". Final track "Practical Animals" is no less dense, but it's a little more math-rock and, more importantly, moodier, as its circular, repetitive riffs become an eight-minute echo chamber of broken machinery and messages cut short, its weary and wistful mood poking through the mélange.
While this record is teeming with ideas, there's something to said for executing just one really well, as they do on "Hello Blood", where the twitching and sputtering has something to play against. After the entirety of the album's wild ride, it might be that first track that lingers in the memory. The dense flurry might be more exhausting for the album's live-in-the-basement production, but it's mostly the band simply being itself, and pushing what worked before further. Maybe We Versus the Shark try too hard sometimes, but they're trying too hard to challenge themselves and find something that's their own. More bands should flail so valiantly.
