As the name suggests, the Ontario band Dirty Nil are profoundly aware of their emptiness and impurity, and the only thing that rouses Luke Bentham and Dave Nardi out of their self-loathing is despising someone else even more. Maybe it was inspired by drinking alone in a dingy apartment, but Higher Power is punk with high-end production values, meant for big rooms. They’re professed classic rock fans and gear snobs and it shows, as Higher Power is an album that sounds like it expects to be paid for. However antisocial Dirty Nil get, the music is intended to be a communal experience.
They’re not really interested in the philosophical restrictions and elitism that often constitutes punk rock anyway. Dirty Nil released a 7” on skate-punk stronghold Fat Wreck Chords and played the Warped Tour—both tend to be a point of no return for bands deciding between a captive pop-punk audience and critical credibility. But it’s all rock'n'roll to Dirty Nil: They boast equal facility with PUP-style beer bongin’ with the devil ("No Weaknesses"), Dilly Dally’s knee-buckling dynamics ("Zombie Eyed"), and the hectoring sing-speak of tourmates Single Mothers and Greys. Higher Power serves as proof that the boundaries separating "indie," "pop punk" and "alt-rock" have collapsed as they’ve been drawn into closer quarters, and to send this point home, they do all of the above just within the first four tracks.
There isn’t really an original note here, but the massive hooks of "No Weaknesses" and "Zombie Eyed" are delivered with enough conviction that they end up sounding fresh anyway. As Higher Power progresses, Dirty Nil continue to expand their range, yet the sequencing makes it sound like a retreat. The satisfying brutality of "Fugue State" starts a run of three songs crammed into less than five minutes; the highs of Side A were bound to make Higher Power sound frontloaded anyway, but Side B practically vanishes before get-in-the-van anthem "Bury Me at the Rodeo Show" ends the record with the closest thing to a Dirty Nil love song.
Even when the music intentionally plays dumb, Bentham and Nardi are clever lyricists, and Higher Power could almost be a narrative concept record about salvation if you play it out of order. Throughout the album, Dirty Nil search for redemption in the usual places: sex ("Wrestle Yu to Husker Du"), drugs ("Zombie Eyed") and rock'n'roll. But they have too much fun with it all to even pretend that hitting rock bottom is actually a bad thing. "Friends in the Sky" aligns Bentham with Satan against Jesus, and it’s as close as he gets to divinity; later on, there’s no spiritual awakening, just an acceptance of what Bart Simpson called a "life of sin followed by the presto-change-o deathbed repentance." Bentham calls out to his higher power and admits, "And even though we never got along/ I’ll say I was wrong/ 'Cause you know we can be friends in the sky." Despite their protestations, only a true punk band would try to pull a fast one on God.
