Die! Die! Die!
Promises Promises
SAF Records
By Jose Fritz
I just love saying this band’s name. It’s not the repetition; it’s that beautiful bludgeoning resolute sentiment. They used to be an obscure New Zealand band with a search engine unfriendly name and a taste for spazzy high-octane post-punk that went down smooth with a nice minty aftertaste of garage punk. I had been buying their albums as imports watching the value of the U.S. dollar slip and the cost of international shipping jump. But on May 29th of 2007 they played live on MTV.
You live longer and are less miserable if you don’t make compromises you can’t live with. Writing music for car commercials, carbonated beverages, personal fragrances, cell phone networks or designer pet carriers will erode your soul, stimulate tumor growth, lower your IQ and lose the war for the allies. Die! Die! Die! did none of those things. They did however perform on a music television network owned by the evil multinational media conglomerate known as Viacom. It’s a minor infraction if there ever was one.
The new album Promises Promises still holds tightly to their core qualities. The vocals are intermittently flat, with a strain and crack that relies more on rhythm than melody. Every song has the visceral, cathartic quality that made them so sensational at the start. Every kick and scratch, every amateurish over-reaching fist to the ear and every stomped foot under the table was sincere even if untrained. Rawness has it’s place in the vegetable section at the grocery and in uninsulated electrical wire, but in rock n’ roll it grows tiresome that some bands may remain ignorant, learning nothing. In recording and re-recording, in touring and touring again, in writing a song, in rewriting and then remixing there is experience to accumulate and ideas to mark as your own in works in urine or the like. Sometimes there endeth the lesson.
Die! Die! Die! was schooled and they are changed. The came, they saw and they conquered. They are less raw than before, using a better class of hair care products and have replaced the shorted cables in their stage gear. Frets polished, they gave up Dunedin and moved into a dank basement in the tenements of Chicago, probably the furthest point inland they’d ever been.
They toured with Wolfmother, The Blood Brothers, Wire and Slint. It’s no coincidence to hear those influences appearing in the production of Promises Promises. They peek out from behind older influences like Straightjacket Fits and Shihad. They are sliding up the scale from a place as agit-punk as Wingtip Sloat toward a more savvy Walkmen-like indie-pop. All the more appropriate they also changed producers from Steve Albini to Kevin McMahon -- two different producers that insist on being called recording engineers but with a radically different oeuvre. The chasm between them is the same as the gap between The Pixies and The Stooges, Bailter Space and Superchunk. It’s fair to say that in the end, our puckish New Zealanders fall in-between as well.
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