Pity the record store clerk. As if filing albums by bands like +/-, !!!, and Sunn O))) wasn't confusing enough, there are also more subtly deceptive bandnames out there lying in ambush. By now, everyone knows not to file Pink Floyd under "F," but one could hardly be blamed heading to the "Misc. E" card with this disc, unaware that Winfred E. Eye is actually a band fronted by a guy named Aaron Calvert. I suppose it would be too perfect for music like this to be made by one person with such a fitting, sideshow-appropriate name, anyway. And I guess it's better (or at least less obvious) than any number of other suitable names, like, say, Tom Waits & The Bad Seeds.
Calvert and his seven-man support corps camp out somewhere between the circus side tent, the witch trials, and the Mississippi Delta, and it winds up sounding something like what one imagines Mr. Waits might sound like with Blixa Bargeld, Kid Congo Powers, Mick Harvey and Warren Ellis backing him up. Calvert's voice isn't as grotesquely grizzled as Waits', but he works hard to get it there. Opener "Run Along", with its bone-room percussion and spookhouse organ, could practically pass for an outtake from Bone Machine if not for the lyrics, which steer far from Waits' twisted Cabinet of Dr. Caligari-esque surrealism and nighthawk poetry and instead come across like a homeless guy's diary entry.
The title track lurches along on junkyard percussion and a slow and nasty blues lick that never changes once, while Calvert yowls like a dying smoker, wailing lines like, "The germs all get eaten by the earthworms sitting on the dirt tier." His lyrics are strange snapshots of ugliness, at times oppressively blunt. The gentle acoustic guitar and accordion arrangement of "Grey Ghosts" is counteracted with brutal lines like, "Your tongue's in trouble for running your mouth/ Proof in your hands/ Fists in your mouth."
As good the music can be, The Dirt Tier suffers from a relentlessly slow pacing that only highlights the cartoonish violence of the lyrics, and its insistence on grit and filth too often feels affected. The reason Tom Waits gets away with stuff like this is that he sees the humor in it, and he plays his persona to the hilt, with delight, and that's one step this band will need to take if they're ever going to step out from under his shadow. For now, The Dirt Tier is the eccentricity without the personality to put it in context.
