At their best, Dirty Three can sound like they might fall apart in an instant. Listen to the way “Ember,” from 2005’s expansive Cinder, seems forever to wobble, as if Warren Ellis’ violin were about to stumble into the canyon created by Jim White’s loping drums. Or ponder how Ellis and guitarist Mick Turner skirt the void while upbraiding their strings during “Red,” from 1996’s breakthrough Horse Stories. An unusually expressive instrumental trio, these three longtime Melbourne chums have always used the tension between their respective playing to foster collective feelings of annoyance or ecstasy, boredom or wonder, anxiety or amusement. In doing so, they have often suggested some ornate mobile hanging from an art museum’s ceiling, its three bejeweled pieces bound together only by rusted wire, perpetually at risk of clattering to the ground. The thrill has been hearing them hold it together.
On Love Changes Everything, Dirty Three’s first album in a dozen years, those corroded wires finally snap, leaving the pieces to smash to the floor and reorient themselves in new relationships. And they do: Ellis, White, and Turner have never sounded so alternately tight and loose, so unified and amorphous, capturing an emotional ambiguity that drifts between hope and despair. Forgoing their usual evocative song titles in favor of a suite of numbered pieces that often flow into and out of one another, Dirty Three have made not only their most absorbing album but also the one that’s most open to interpretation. It is a convincing case study in how a veteran band, each member now nearing or beyond 60, can evolve—letting go, once and for all, of preconceptions and self-perceptions and simply meeting where they are.
Dirty Three emerged in the early ’90s from exuberant youthful squalor, playing long hours in Australian bars for crowds that found them perplexing or polarizing. But international attention, especially in the United States, became their passport. They toured doggedly and collaborated promiscuously. White and Turner joined Cat Power for 1998’s Moon Pix. Ellis partnered with another expat, Nick Cave, in a prolific ongoing relationship. As the years passed, Dirty Three themselves became more focused, as if the band were a repository for a specific subset of sounds and ideas for musicians who were otherwise busy doing lots of things—painting and making exquisite solo records, playing with Bill Callahan and dozens of others, becoming a score-writing Bad Seed.
These days, Ellis, Turner, and White are scattered across continents and hemispheres—Turner in Melbourne, White in Brooklyn, Ellis in Paris. Their separate careers and lives have made them less subservient to outstanding notions of what the Dirty Three are meant to be. “We sat down and played, which is what we used to do in the early days,” as Ellis told The Guardian of the 2022 session that rendered Love Changes Everything, “informed by the sort of Impulse! records where they just got in and blew, you know?”
This looseness is Love Changes Everything’s new boon, as if the Dirty Three have finally obtained permission to be whatever they want. Ellis actually sings on the second piece. His looped sighs and plaintive piano chords serve as the soft canvas for a kind of fragmented duet between White and Turner. Bandmates since the mid-’80s, the two size one another up after reuniting in a cozy Melbourne studio, as if nodding their greetings. It feels like a bittersweet hymn for aging and surviving. Its successor suggests a group hug or a lazy late-night conversation after a long day of work, each member of the trio contributing a bit that interlaces with the rest of the band. In the last minute, especially, Ellis’ pizzicato plucks casually slip into perfect lockstep with the slow sway shared between Turner and White.
But the key to Dirty Three remains unchanged: the way each member can somehow play something that seems largely unrelated to the rest of the band, yet still works within the whole. Zoom in on an individual part or zoom out for the gestalt of it all: Dirty Three’s music suits either perspective. It’s like staring at a Clyfford Still painting, as mesmerized by each discrete block of color as the entire enormous piece.
During the opener, you can follow Turner’s clinched guitar part from its beginning amplifier groan to its introductory coiled riff to its final splenetic variation. White first taps in as if to take the group’s temperature, mostly disappears for the better part of a minute, and then rumbles back in with Keith Moon-sized might. The whole track is a demented and joyous leap into kosmische oblivion, each player pushing the others deeper into a trance. With Dirty Three, and especially on Love Changes Everything, the whole is not necessarily greater than the sum of its parts; it’s just perplexingly different, the quality that makes this music feel like a discovery every time you listen.
Love Changes Everything ends with two interconnected pieces that, together, constitute 16 of Dirty Three’s most beautiful and emotional minutes in 32 years. At the start, they steadily ratchet the intensity, Ellis’ violin wailing like a mourner over drum-and-guitar interplay that conjures the devotional tizzy of Gnaoua music. Just when it becomes feverish, though, the spell breaks, pieces falling again to the floor. Ellis is the first to return for the finale, his call-and-response violin pulling the rest of the band toward the center. By the track’s end, his piano flurries, White’s circular drums, and Turner’s guitar shards coil into one, moving as a peristaltic wave. Dirty Three have rarely sounded as triumphant as they do here, locked into the pure communion of making music together. They steadily rise, stretching back toward the ceiling until, without warning, they collapse one more time.
