Dirty Three: Love Changes Everything review – aggressive and transcendent

Both aggressive and transcendent, Australian instrumental trio Dirty Three occupy a niche few other bands can match: they are seers with attitude, alternating periods of elevated calm with churning crescendos. Dirty Three’s 10th studio album, arriving a full dozen years after its predecessor, Toward the Low Sun (2012), ably restates the band’s core offering: Warren Ellis’s hard-living violin, often played through distortion pedals, offset against Mick Turner’s eloquent guitar, with jazz-adjacent drummer Jim White providing space and perspective; Ellis also adds keyboards and hovering drones.

All have other careers – Ellis as right-hand man to Nick Cave, Turner playing solo and collaborating widely, White supplying broken backbones to Bill Callahan and Cretan lute player George Xylouris, among others. But there’s a particular tensile strength to their foundational triangle shape. Six tracks, all titled Love Changes Everything, accrete here like layers of paint, intensifying in hue. The band’s unkempt bona fides are established early through some lo-fi textures in the opening track, while the more pensive shades of the album’s midsection emphasise plucked and wistful beauty. It all inevitably ends on a pair of saturated pile-ups (V and VI), Ellis’s violin surfing across the brinkmanship of his bandmates beneath.