She Has No Strings Apollo

Album Review

On She Has No Strings Apollo, the Dirty Three again offer up the sounds of their hearts and inner landscapes to the skies and whoever's listening. The band's tendency to start a song quiet, loose, and lovely and then slowly sweat it into a faster, intensified crescendo is familiar by now, but somehow remains vividly evocative. The emotional road from heartbreak and regret, expressed through beating music with wailing violin ("Alice Wading"), to feeling lost, heard in a song's slow unraveling ("She Lifted the Net"), and back again is part of humanity's oldest story, and is a tale that violinist Warren Ellis, guitarist Mick Turner, and drummer Jim White are good at telling. If you are a fan of the Dirty Three's past expressions, you'll be moved by their sound again as they relay new wordless tales of woe, sadness, and things past. Worth noting: The quieter, reflective pieces like "Long Way to Go With No Punch" deliver moments of reprieve, and bass guitar (played by Turner) is heard for the first time on a Dirty Three album since 1994's Sad & Dangerous.