Experience great music and video on demand with our broadband media player. Listen to music, watch videos, and experience podcasts, interviews, and multimedia features.
Dirty On Purpose have introduced the world to their brand of haze-washed pop on their new album Hallelujah Sirens. They make orchestrated pop songs with big swirling guitars, caked with reverb and distorsion. It sounds clean and fuzzy at the same time. See how they came up with the band name? They made the music sound dirty on purpose.
These guys really move around the musical map. I'm hearing influences of Pavement, Yo La Tengo, brit-pop with shoegaze leanings, and Islands. But they've worked it into their own sound and songwriting style, it's distinctly Dirty On Purpose.
On the song Light Pollution, the band offers jangly indie pop that is at times psychedelic and straight-forward pop in unison. It ends being an unlikely combination of hazy, swirling pop that sticks with you after you're done listening.
On Marfa Lights, the pop engine cranks up with more of a full-bodied Catherine Wheel type of feel. The guitars bounce around in distorted reverb, the drums are quick, the song is urgent.
My overall favorite is the album's final song, Fake Lakes, where the hazy space of guitar distorsion is left out in favor of a cleaner jangle. The vocals are more forward in their presence, they don't get lost in the sound of a big instrumentation. If the other songs on the album wander off into big sounds, this one is slow build on top of a good melody. You want it to go big like the others, but it makes you wait in a very determined way. 3/4 of the way through, it hangs you out on the way to the chorus, more waiting as the wash of lead guitar ripples through to the chorus. A very scaled down finish to a big sounding album. It almost leaves you wanting more, as it's probably the best pop song on the record, but hey, that's what the repeat button is for...
