Better Go Home Now - Dirty Three

A few years ago I saw viking metal band Turisas open for DragonForce at what was once the Astoria. Midway through a set filled with nordic costumes, battle cries and uncomfortable amounts of sweatgrease, their electric violin player stepped up to the microphone. He assessed the audience carefully, eyes tight behind costumepaint and spot lights. Slowly he leaned forward into the mic and screamed, 'FUCK THE GUITAR.' He pulled a screeching note on his violin, allowing the tension to build. He leaned in again, a wolfish grin dancing on his face, 'FUCK. THE. GUITAR.' Another wild scream from the violin. Then raising his arms out to all of us in the pit, he cried with the strength of all of our voices: 'FUCK THE GUITAR!' Then he raised his violin high and ripped out a histrionic solo that sounded... just like a guitar.

It was an oddly deflating moment. Sure maybe the sound was a little more fluid, but there was no denying how little there was to differentiate the sound of a speed metal guitar solo and speed metal violin solo. It resolutely refused to take advantage of the sound of the instrument, pushing it as hard as it could to be what it wasn't. While the rest of the set has faded from memory, I still remember how completely gypped I felt- both for myself and for the instrument. That was the violin's moment to rock out, and instead it got to play karaoke to Power Metal's Greatest Hits.

So it was with enormous pleasure that I stumbled across Dirty Three some years later.

Dirty Three are (as the name suggests) a three piece band consisting of Mick Turner on guitar, Jim White on drums, and Warren Ellis on violin. The band create an instrumental wall of sound akin to folk music falling out of a 50th floor window. It's by turns howling and spitting to achingly gentle and sombre- and pushed right out front of the sound is the violin.

This. This is what the violin should have sounded like that night with Turisas. With Ellis hammering the strings the instrument sounds entirely unhinged, flitting between bluesy reels to industrial squalls. It manages to hit the same raging and muscular postures of an electric guitar whilst maintaining an identity and sound entirely it's own.

Today's Best Song Ever is 'Better Go Home Now,' taken from Dirty Three's self-titled second album. The song is a pounding summoning of the muse, White's leaden snares thudding and chugging with Turner's thick rhythm. Screeching through the dense underbelly like a hot wire through brick are Ellis' violin solos- a waltzing, roaring, disintegrating sound equally human and chillingly alien. Here, finally, is a song that can truly live up to Turisas' challenging refrain: Fuck the Guitar.

Council Flat Blues - Eagulls

Take this and listen to it loudly:

Bet you didn't realize that mere moments after pressing play you were about to drown in a thunderous tsunami of everything that makes rock awesome. Bruised guitar melodies ache and weave inside walls of distortion. Drums fall from the sky like Satan's own meteor shower. Muddy rumbling bass oozes out across you before hardening into a diamond edge. And those throat shredding vocals barely treading the line between impassioned rage and balls out screaming.

This is Council Flat Blues, the debut single of Eagulls- the art school rockers leveling Leeds with one mighty hammer of the guitar. An album is coming. You should get it.

I see you eyeing up the video again, a guilty sweat breaking out. It's going to be okay, this is simply the sound of rock finding its testicles again. It loses them from time to time. It just takes a stroke of brutal awesome like this song and a band like Eagulls to sew them back on with barbed wire and nothing but whisky for anesthetic.

Fuck. Yes.

Eagulls – Council Flat Blues

Crazy Hazy Kisses - Flat Duo Jets

So before we do anything watch this and of course, make it loud:

Hooooooooly shit, right? That little slice of blues doesn't just rattle your ribcage, it stomps on your bones till there's nothing left but dust, and then sets the remains on fire just to make sure.

The two dark haired banshees in that video are Dexter Romweber (guitar and vocals) and Chris 'Crow' Smith (drums), better known as Flat Duo Jets. The blues duo, sadly long since disbanded, rocked the doors off of their hometown of Carrboro, North Carolina and the rest of the States through most of the 80s into the late 90s before going their separate ways.

In what should be counted as a crime against humanity, Crazy Hazy Kisses never appeared on any of the Flat Duo Jets records, it's sole appearance being in obscure music documentary Athens, G.A. (and later in Davis Guggenheim's It Might Get Loud). But what an appearance it is.

Dexter Romweber attacks his weathered Dan Electro with the fury of a hurricane; primal screams tearing out of him with such spine chilling power you can feel flecks of lung and bone battering your ear drums. Crow's drums, woefully under-mixed in that bootleg clip, still pack a wallop of boiling rills, rolls and spills. It's the kind of number that makes you want to dance, fuck and kill; preferably all at once.

Getting ahold of the track can be a bit tricky, but a bit of You Tube audio grabbing wizardry will get this gem into your hot little hands.

However you can. Get it. Now. And if anyone ever tells you that 50s style rock has no balls, play them this track, so it can kick them squarely in their own.