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Some people grow to adulthood in a seamless progression from school to university to employment, staying safely within society's boundaries. Others have a rockier transition out of adolescence; they abandon everything and beat a hasty path to Europe to "find" themselves. On the surface it seems like a flimsy and undeveloped strategy, but it often provides the inspirational spark they need. That's because the streets of cities like Paris, Budapest and Vienna surround the casual slacker tourists with an indefensible perfume of history and melancholia that's headier than anything they've experienced back home. The more daring travelers take their soul searching a step further, ducking in off the boulevards to congregate with the shady natives. In his early 20s, Warren Ellis left his quaint hometown 80 miles northwest of Melbourne, Australia, and voyaged to Europe, where his experiences shaped his future and led him to the Dirty Three. As a boy, he'd taught himself to play an accordion that he'd found while rummaging around in the town garbage dump. But he soon switched to violin and learned from a book of bluegrass tunes given him by his father, a country and western singer obsessed with Hank Williams. "I started playing the violin by accident," the 33-year-old Ellis says groggily, speaking from a tour stop in Maryland. "I started playing it to meet girls, but there were no girls there." After busking in Scotland and Ireland, he found himself in pre-Velvet Revolution Budapest, cavorting with an unusual strain of Germans. "It was this medieval group that shot animals and made their own clothes out of fur," Ellis recalls. "They also made their own instruments, and I ended up playing with them for awhile. Then I met these Hungarian guys. I couldn't speak their language, but we played music together." Ellis' adventures lasted only nine months, but he returned to Australia profoundly moved. So much so that he stopped playing violin. "It was such a vibrant experience that I'd had musically, and it seemed so far removed when I went back," he says. Five years later, Ellis resumed playing and met drummer Jim White and guitarist Mick Turner, who'd just returned from a stint in New York. The three, who soon became the Dirty Three, came together to strike up some background music at a bar owned by a friend of Ellis. This casual arrangement would inform and shape the trio's music as it continued to perform at pubs throughout Australia in the mid-'90s, and eventually recorded its first album in a rented theater. The informal settings and the individual members' disparate musical backgrounds inspired a sound even more distinctive and striking than the violin-drums-guitar lineup itself. From the beginning, the Dirty Three drifted organically between languid, sweeping passages and careening, screech-tinted noise segments, and it has further developed this formula to become the most effortlessly evocative instrumental rock band of its time. Horse Stories, the band's 1996 follow-up to its self-titled breakthrough a year earlier, didn't need lyrics to convey its equine theme; the billowy guitar riffs, anti-rhythmic drumming and surging violin suggested an uneven but picturesque horseback ride across a sparse landscape. "Horse Stories was our record of travel. That was us trying to come to terms with what was going on," Ellis says, reflecting on the evolution from bar band to touring headliners. "Our lives changed dramatically in the two years before we made that record, and it was a way of dealing with it." The album's success necessitated more touring, and the Dirty Three would spend the next year headlining shows and opening for countrymates Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in places as far afield as Israel and Greece. The three began to splinter, with Ellis signing on to play with Cave, and Turner and White going off to work on solo and side projects (together they released an EP under the name the Brothers Tren). "We'd gotten into this pattern where we were touring so much that we couldn't write anything new, and we were playing the same things over and over again," Ellis explains. But the trio regrouped in Chicago late last year and, with no new material already written, reverted to the tactics from its earliest days. "We sat down and started playing like we did in the bar," Ellis says. Soon, the band had the material for Ocean Songs (Touch and Go), the Dirty Three's fourth and most gentle album. Even without titles like "The Restless Waves," "Distant Shore" and "Deep Waters," the aquatic motifs would come through as clearly as sonar in a lagoon. Ellis leads the way with undiluted violin parts that glimmer, carrying a faint tinge of an Eastern European folk-music influence that he evidently picked up as a young man. Ocean Songs is a peaceful, vaguely celebratory record that's a kind of distant relative to Strauss' The Blue Danube. "This album is not so immediate," says Ellis. "It requires more involvement from the listener. It's more dynamic than anything we've ever done before. It exists within the music rather than being so obvious." |
