Here’s a challenge for you: describe the music of Liverpool without a single reference to the Beatles. It’s a difficult ask, but over the decades many Merseyside bands have managed to shed any association to the hyper-influential quartet. Whether it was Echo and the Bunnymen, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Wombats or even Atomic Kitten, plenty of acts have come and gone and comparisons to John, Paul, George and Ringo couldn’t be further from people’s minds. Recent years, however, has seen five men come together with the vision that perhaps, this decade should belong to the Dirty Rivers.
The Dirty Rivers burst onto the scene just about two years ago now, and since then they’ve enjoyed nothing more than making noise. The recent release of ‘Black Heart/Filth’ is just as far from the band’s labelmates of the Coral and the Zutons as it is from the aforementioned bands with whom they’ve shared a dialing code. The vocals of Mike Ellis echo over a raw collision of guitars operated by Jay Roberts and Ryan Ellis. In the almost six minutes that the track takes up, it’s near impossibly to pull yourself away, as the “grunge meets arena rock” sound is incredibly hard to get enough of. It’s a solid way for the band to start 2013, and if it’s a sign of what’s to come then the future is incandescent for the Liverpudlians.
Turning the clock back a little way leads you to ‘Get Your Guns Out’, a snappier but similarly punchy effort that sees the entire band hitting all the right notes. The perfect firestarter for the band in a live setting, Ellis belts out the direction of “when the red light flashes, you gotta lose control”, and its easy to imagine the masses following his command. Even on record the frontman seems to carry the kind of smooth charisma which is almost a holy grail for rock vocalists. Such a perception carries over into the band’s newest single ‘The Kid’, a darker sounding effort that nevertheless seems to fill the room as it accelerates into life. It’s the guitars in the foreground of this particular track rather than the vocals, and it’s this kind of spotlight shifting that takes the band from being your simple run-of-the-mill rock band to become a multiple-headed beast with the potential to move mountains. There is nothing “colour by numbers” about Liverpool’s latest offering, and it’s starting to seem like 2013 may be the year that people really start taking notice.
The Dirty Rivers are not a band to be pinned down by their heritage. If you’re like me and miss the sound of Oasis, but you don’t miss Oasis themselves, then the Dirty Rivers have you covered, taking the best of it, throwing in some Stooges-style venom and wrapping it all up with a raw power that could leave many listeners breathless in a live setting. And despite the uncomfortably high amount of other acts name-dropped in this feature, in the end it’s all about the Dirty Rivers. Which is exactly the way it should be.
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