Seven years is long enough for people to forget about you, but not quite long enough to cast your reunion as a victorious, back-from-the-dead surprise. Then again, Dirty Three didn't so much dramatically break up as simply run out of roads to travel. From 1993 to 2005, the band had pushed its minimal violin/guitar/drum set-up to epic extremes, from desert-storming ragers (1996's Horse Stories) to exquisitely melancholic meditations (1998's Ocean Songs) to Godspeed-sized pomp-rock spectacle (2000's Whatever You Love, You Are). But the Australian trio's last release, Cinder, felt like a conscious act of retreat, what with compact three-minute compositions and Cat Power cameos nudging their once-volatile sound toward NPR-friendly accessibility. But it's not as if Dirty Three have been spending the past seven years trying to refine and build upon Cinder's pop overtures; as Toward the Low Sun strongly suggests, it's just taken them that long to unlearn everything they've known before in an attempt to start anew.
Of course, violinist Warren Ellis had a lot of practice in the deconstruction department during the intervening years, having reported back to active Bad Seeds duty for the especially sleazy Dig, Lazarus Dig!!!, while joining Nick Cave's even more depraved offshoot act Grinderman for a two-album skronk-rock joyride. So it's fitting that Toward the Low Sun's torrential opener, "Furnace Skies", sounds like it was recorded with Grinderman's still-warm equipment; it reintroduces us to Dirty Three mid-freakout, with ever-astounding drummer Jim White treating his snare drum like a machine-gunned target at a firing range, while Ellis and Mick Turner respectively poke through the percussive melee with teaser violin refrains and random shards of electric guitar. The appearance of a three-note Farfisa riff partway through introduces some semblance of shape to the piece, but "Furnace Skies" is essentially what you'd expect from a band that hasn't played together in several years: It's a warm-up exercise, an opportunity to get the limbs loosened, the blood pumping, and the instruments tuned. But it also sets you up for a big payoff that the rest of Toward the Low Sun isn't so keen to deliver.
In recent interviews, Ellis has not been shy in admitting that Toward the Low Sun was a difficult album to make, delayed by false starts and aborted sessions and, as such, there's a hesitant feel to the recordings that more readily captures the sound of a band getting reacquainted rather than reinvigorated. Even on the tracks with more easily discernible forms-- like the countrified lope of "Moon on the Land"-- Dirty Three prefer to drift along and let structure materialize by happenstance, rather than impose any predetermined script on the compositions, while songs that carry the suggestion of intensifying into something more powerful ("Rising Below", "The Pier") pull back before they truly erupt. As a result, Toward the Low Sun is never so bold as to match the horsehair-raising crescendos of Dirty Three's early signature works, nor does it offer the melodic immediacy of Cinder. It's an album that presents a series of beautifully desolate valleys, but without the volcanic peaks to lend them a greater definition.
It's tempting to view Toward the Low Sun as the sort of record that was sequenced according to the order the songs were recorded, as the performances grow markedly more assured and intuitive the deeper you venture into the collection. "That Was Was" provides a welcome jolt in the form of a grungy, "Cortez the Killer"-style grind that showcases the delightfully nasty qualities of Ellis' fiddle, while the absolutely stunning "Ashen Snow"-- guided by Turner's gentle piano melody and Ellis' beautifully mournful violin line-- affirms this band's ability to devastate even in the absence of their usual string-slashing, stage-stomping gestures. After an iffy start, Toward the Low Sun thankfully picks up a head full of steam in its closing stretch-- hopefully, this momentum won't dissipate over another seven-year layoff.
