Friday Full-Length: Dirty Streets, Distractions
Posted in Bootleg Theater on January 7th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
Dirty Streets and the parable of the band in-between. In the widely splintered umbrellar existence that is rock and roll, it happens a lot that bands, styles, sounds, get put into groups. One sees this all the time in arguments of genre: “Is this heavy,” “does it doom,” and so on. The truth of the matter is who cares if it’s good, but given the chance to do so, humanity has proved time and again to be ready and willing to separate itself into tribes and microcultures, even when the thing uniting people in doing so is the need to splinter off from the larger subset.
These are generalizations — it’s easy to imagine a sociologist with rolled eyes — but when I think of Memphis three-piece the Dirty Streets, they seem to fit that bill of the outlier act who’ve perhaps suffered by not being so neatly cast as one thing or another. Fronted by guitarist Justin Toland, with Thomas Storz on an ever-righteous bass and Andrew Denham offering a classic swing on drums, they’ve been at it for well over a decade at this point, releasing their first album, Portrait of a Man, in 2009 before following it with 2011’s Movements (review here) and getting signed for 2013’s Blades of Grass (review here) by Alive Naturalsound Records, which has backed their offerings ever since.
Now, that’s not inconsiderable backing to have, but as 2018’s Distractions readily demonstrates, the Dirty Streets are a better band than people know, and they have been all along. What do you do with the fuzzy opener “Loving Man” except groove? What about the heavy blues of the “The Sound” or the later “Take a Walk” — with its subtly trippy vocals and rhythm so set to move you it feels like it inspired the name of the song — or the acoustic-led, semi-twang vibing “On the Way” ahead of the rousing funk-riffed “Trying to Remember?” There’s 10 songs on this record, it’s 34 minutes long, and from the slide guitar in “Dream” to the trucker-blues of “Death’s Creep,” there really isn’t a dud in the bunch.
This is what the Dirty Streets have always done. They’ve put together a killer collection of killer songs. Classic sound that’s not too much tipped toward vintage stylization, organic performances from all three players — and all three players of a caliber that would be a standout in another band; a multifaceted power in the power trio — quality material, quality sound. Distractions works from a high standard, and it’s a standard that the Dirty Streets have seemed to have set for themselves all along. And they’ve still managed to grow as a unit over time, only developing more chemistry and nuance of arrangement while making their songs sound almost humble for how unindulgent they are. Like “oh nothing too fancy just a hook that’s gonna be in your head for the next three weeks.” If this was another group, there’d be keyboards and strings all over “On the Way” and it’d be eight minutes long, or “Can’t Go Back” would have a 10-minute jam in the middle.
And maybe that’d be awesome, but that’s the thing about Dirty Streets — it’s not their bag. For all the accolades one might shower on their performances or production, they’re a songwriting band. “Can’t Go Back” is damn near perfect. So’s “The Sound.” I mean, really, what more would you want rock and roll to be? But that’s part of it too, because while Dirty Streets have been doing this thing and doing it so well for so long now, they’ve never really been willing to either jump up and down for attention in the pandering way of modern social media — “hey everybody what’s your favorite song of ours?” blah blah “you want us to tour?” blah blah — or to pigeonhole themselves into a niche within their niche. On the broadest level, they’re a heavy rock band, but that doesn’t account for the blues, the country, the soul, the classic heavy (well maybe that) or even the sometimes-there edge of psychedelia in their sound.
I don’t know if it’s that Distractions is doing anything so different from, say, 2015’s White Horse (review here), which preceded, but it shows the trio going full-on with who they are. They’ve never sounded more efficient or refined than they do in these tracks, and maybe even the sheer level of class in what they do is part of what’s kept them so consistently underrated. “Riding High” is a party and if you’ve got a fuzz quota, they fill it early with “Loving Man.” Why isn’t this band on tour with Clutch? Why am I not getting vague, largely-info-less press releases about their records six months in advance to start building the hype?
The obvious answer is maybe that’s not what the band wants. Maybe they don’t want to be on the road all the time, or to have all the inflated hoopla surrounding their outings. Maybe their endgame is that the records do the talking for them, and frankly, that’s fair enough, because often in the parable of the band in-between, that’s exactly what happens. The Dirty Streets are underrated now. Maybe in 20 years, divorced from the context of the various genre-tribes as they are now — of course there’ll be different ones then, no worries, and they’ll probably call themselves the same things — someone steps up and reissues their catalog and they’re heralded as lost classics. The kind of records that, in hindsight, leave listeners scratching their heads like, “Why wasn’t this band huge?” like so many Akarma-unearthed ’70s LPs or any number of Euro treasures from the original ’90s stoner rock era waiting to be re-pressed. Email me for a list.
Seriously, I don’t know that that’s ever going to happen or it’s not, but it’s certainly possible. What I’d say instead of waiting around for that is that you take the time today — not even that much time, damnit! 34 minutes! — to put on Distractions and try to listen without them for a while. Put your head in the right space and go where the record takes you. I think you’ll find the Dirty Streets are worth appreciating in the here and now, and that whatever comes however many decades down the line or doesn’t, you’ll not regret having already been on board.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
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I could detail you any number of mundane miseries from the week or tell you about feeling disconnected and wrong in my own body, wanting not to eat, eating, not sleeping, but I’m gonna go play with my kid in the snow. Great and safe weekend. Have fun, hydrate, watch your head. All that stuff.
FRM.