Dirty dinner music with Aussie rockers

Dirty Three is what one would call post-rock, whatever that means. The group which formed in Melbourne in 1992 features Bad Seeds' violinist Warren Ellis and famous session and touring musicians Mick Turner on guitar and Jim White on drums. In fact, the group's sustained crescendo feels like the instrumental versions of a Nick Cave record. White and Turner are really mantels for Ellis' scratchy, restrained violin, which always takes the place of vocal duties on Dirty Three albums. To get comatose, side one of She Has No Strings At The Apollo beats out ambient bands Sigur Ros or Godspeed You Black Emperor! by issuing repetitive patterns to calm even the most nervous folks. The fact that The Dirty Three constantly sound like they might fall apart at any moment keeps the listener's attention. The violin has always been the most beautiful instrument precisely because it sounds as if it could never be tamed, and one can only hope a horses tail will keep the grating nature of the little piece of wood to a minimum. So, yeah, post-rock, well I guess what that's all about is high-brow pretensions and that sort of thing. The Dirty Three aren't the Stooges or Chuck Berry, maybe Velvet Underground with Stravinsky.