Whatever You Love

The flowering of post-rockers like Mogwai and Godspeed . . . may also bear fruit for the three-leafed Australian clover that is Warren Ellis's gang but in terns of trends and fashions, Dirty Three have always stood on their own six feet. And they show no sign of falling over here.

Taking up where Ocean Songs left off, this latest collection features six winding instrumentals that take on a life of their own, yet gel to form a seamless, cohesive whole. No wonder the Cocteau Twins took them under their wing (Whatever You Love . . . comes to us via their studio and record label).

Warren Ellis's violin-playing is instinctive and brimful of personality and if no Dirty Three album has ever done justice to the jaw-dropping spectacle that is seeing this string magician on stage, then that's more a compliment to his stage-spark than it is a criticism of these studio recordings.

But let's not forget they're a trio - and all dirty players too: Jim White's idiosyncratic brushes - serene one stroke, serrated the next - and guitarist Mick Turner's yen for anticipating Ellis's musical brain, all make this band a potent force.

If the overall feeling evoked is one of distilled melancholy, the moods nevertheless shift from the ponderous to the thunderous almost without you noticing. 'I Offered It Up To The Stars And The Night Sky', for instance, is a 13-minute Homeric epic, which starts out in sadness and leads to madness - focus, for instance, on Turner's guitar, which mutates from so-subtle-it's-almost-not-there bass lines on his guitar to mournful minor chord jangles to full-blown white noise white-out of a sort that would perforate even Lee Ranaldo's eardrum.

Also, the collective effect of the multi-tracked violins sometimes brings this music closer to contemporary classical music than to traditional folk structures and yet, in a really elemental way, Dirty Three are a kick-ass rock'n'roll band. There's echoes of Hendrix's manic unpredictability in Ellis's playing and the same paradoxical unselfconscious showmanship.

And metaphorically, Ellis also takes a lighted match to his instrument. It's just that when it burns, it burns very slowly indeed.