Review: The Dirtbombs - Party Store

Artist: The Dirtbombs
Title: Party Store
Format: Full-length
Year: 2011
Label: In The Red Records
Genre: Garage band goes Techno
Rating: 41 / 100

As you might have noticed, The Dirtbombs are from Detroit, the home of many famous and less famous artists like The White Stripes, MC5 and The Gories (Mick Collins' previous band). Detroit is also known for a fair amount of techno artists. Mick Collins and his Dirtbombs really thought it was a good idea to make a garage rock album covering some of these songs. For me personally the mixture of techno and garage rock could as well be dumped in the same imaginary trash bin as alternative country black metal, avant-garde speedfunk, atmospheric Bar Mitsvahcore, party death metal and 8-bit polka blues.

The Dirtboms already had a bit of a weird history concerning the sound of all the individual albums they produce. Ultraglide in Black was some kind of bluesy rock, We Have You Surrounded left all the blues and sounded somewhat more like a "general" garage rock album. Now we have Party Store, I had a really hard time listening this whole album at once, one of the main reasons being me asking myself frequently what the musicians were thinking during the recording process. Maybe they have a certain gift, making them enjoy techno played by fuzzy guitars, a gift I obviously don't have, making me unable to enjoy the anti-harmonic, uncohesive, repititive way of playing, often present on this record.

Normally I wouldn't review records containing a genre I can't enjoy, like most hip-hop and r 'n b, but this is The Dirtbombs, a band I used to enjoy. Looking at the rest of their discography I would, with ease, call this a superfluous record. At the moment when an obscure split with King Khan & His Shrines is a more valuable addition to your list of recordings than a newly released full-length, there is something wrong. Looking at the oh, so famous interwebz, there are apparently a huge amount of people who seem to like this album. Maybe this record would be better if I was into obscure Detroit techno, but to be fair, I am not. For now, 41/100 is more than enough.

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Selwin.