Master Volume

Description

Sure, playing 350 shows over the past three years all over the world was pretty impressive. Opening for The Who in front of 50,000 people? Not bad for a couple of loudmouths from the quaint, quiet valley town of Dundas, Ontario. And, sure, winning the Juno Award for Breakthrough Group of the Year made the parents proud. But of all the accomplishments that Hamilton-based power trio The Dirty Nil have ticked off their bucket list since coughing up their debut single, Fuckin Up Young, in 2011, nothing tops the honour that was bestowed upon them back on March 23, 2015.

If you go on Reddit, drummer Kyle Fisher begins, a video that we had on our Instagram made the top listing of the WTF page! We were staying at a hotel in East Dallaswhich we later found out was not a good place to stay. The only room available was a smoking room with that shitty plastic covering on the mattress. And it was a weird night there, with police and drug dealers out in the halls. But when we woke up in the morning, and opened the door, there was a huge, long trail of ants going from one end of the hallway to the other end!

Like any group of true artists, The Dirty Nil channel trauma into their music and on the bands second album, Master Volume, the harrowing experience of seeing the inside of Americas most disgusting hotels, night in and night out, manifests itself in the song Super 8. Im halfway to hell/ Its called Super 8 Motel, Luke Bentham sings, stretching out the words with the palpable pain of someone whos struggling to catch some precious between-gigs shut-eye on a mattress riddled with bed bugs and stains of dubious origin. But for The Dirty Nil, the effects of non-stop touring go way beyond translating one-star Trip Advisor reviews into song.

The Dirty Nil didnt just spend the past few years on the road in support of their debut album, Higher Power and companion collection of early singles, Minimum R&B. They spent of much of it opening forand, more importantly, studyingthe greats: Against Me, Billy Talent, Alexisonfire. Theyre bands who, like the Nil, cut their teeth for years on the punk circuit playing the dingiest of dives, but now find themselves playing arenas and headlining festivals. With Master Volume, The Dirty Nil are ready to make the same leapnot by polishing their sound for radio, but by bulking it up to fill the stadiums and open fields of their most vivid rock n roll fantasies.

Says Luke, I think the experience of playing with bands like Against Mebands that can put on a proper fucking rock showand seeing what works in a big space definitely crept into the way we think about songs, and how to sound powerful. A lot of the times, when you play blitzkrieg-fast, it has a way of sounding awesome in a club. But when youre playing in a giant space with some sound guy whos never seen you before mixing you, it can be a roll of the dice.

Adds Kyle, Everyone says, a good songs a good song no matter how its recorded. But a good song cant be a good song if nobody can hear it properly!

Produced by veteran alt-rock architect John Goodmanson, Master Volume is an album that crunches and grooves where the band once smashed and trashed, unleashing the Nils undiminished raw power in more controlled waves to better target the back rows. Its less of a sprint and more of a strut, Luke says, and he credits a great deal of the tempo shift to the arrival of Ross Miller, who replaced original bassist Dave Nardi in early 2017. While Ross was already Luke and Kyles roommate, his pedigree includes playing with everyone from Wanda Jackson to Single Mothers.

Im a big fan of the drums, Ross says, so my intention on the bass is to make the drums sound the best they canKyle always comes up with cool grooves and I dont want to fuck that up. I want there to be lots of space so everything shines through.

Adds Luke: It takes a lot of confidence to play slower and have a discernible pulse, and Ross totally bounces! And Kyle plays hip-hop style drums when hes in his natural element, so it was fun making songs around that. I would come up with some chords and lyrics and melodies, and they would be totally molded around what the fuckin Funk Brothers were laying down over here.

Now, we should be clear that The Dirty Nil have not transformed themselves into a shirtless, bass-slappin, Chili Peppered punk-funk unit not that theres anything wrong with that. After all, the band were stoked to work with Goodmanson not because hes produced Sleater-Kinney or Bikini Kill or Blonde Redhead or any number of highly respected indie-rock acts; they were more impressed by his mosh-friendly credentials. Says Luke, We just fucking punished him the entire time for nu-metal stories. Death Cab for Cutie? We dont give a shit! Tell us about Saliva! I think one of the most important and liberating things about the climate in which we made this album is that we celebrate white noise and Sugar Ray and everything in between. We dont give a shit. We like all rock music, even terrible rock music. Well listen to Kill Em All and My War and then well just listen to Aerosmith and St. Anger.

And theyll also shamelessly steal song titles from The Beatles (Please, Please Me) and Cheap Trick (Auf Wiedersehen) just for shits n giggles. (Were improving them, Luke says with an unsubtle grin.) But the joy and bravado with which the Nil deliver Master Volumes pummeling power-pop missives bely the often grim narratives embedded within. The first two songs aloneThats What Heaven Feels Like and Bathed in Lightfind Luke dying in two different car crashes, flying through smashed windshields and talking to his deceased grandma in heaven; Always High sees him eulogizing an ill-fated driver lying on the roadside with their head split open. (What can I say, most of the rock n roll Ive consumed in my lifetime has something to do with fast cars, as Van Halen as that sounds, Luke reasons. And weve definitely seen our share of roadside carnage travelling in the Southern states.) I Dont Want That Phone Call is an even more brutally frank treatise on impending death, with Luke pleading to an addict friend to get help and spare him the inevitable call from the morgue. And sure, the album has two songs that could practically qualify as ballads, but the first one (Auf Wiedersehn) unleashes its ache in a throat-shredding chorus of FUCK YOU, and the second (Evil Side) builds to an atomic, noise-blasted climax that, when the band perform it in concert, is liable to trigger an earthquake that swallows up the circle pit.

I dont ever sit down and say, Im going to write about a song about this today, Luke explains. I just open my mouth and start playing and some pretty heinous shit comes out! I definitely enjoy morbid subject matter of all spades, but I like to try to flash a smirk in there with it, because I think its important to paint with different brushes. And listening to certain writers I love, like Townes Van Zandthe has that sort of bleakness, but also with a little bit of humour with it.

Loaded with steady-grooving songs about living fast and life-affirming anthems about dying young, Master Volume ultimately amplifies The Dirty Nils most essential quality: their refusal to be defined. Theyre too melodic and muscular to be purely punk, but too raucous and unhinged to pass as straight pop; too cheeky to be overtly political, but still acutely in tune with the unsettled, anxious energy of the times in which we live. Whether you find catharsis in a crowd-surf or a street protest, Master Volume captures the ecstatic rush of getting swept up in a communal moment and the frantic fear that it can all come crashing down at any second.

Luke concludes with a laugh: We dont really label ourselves other than just the best band. Thats our genre!