Dahlia (real name: Paul Cafaro) is a top-flight music producer (does stuff for the likes of The Offspring, whose singer cameos here, alongside the likes of guitarist Nick Oliveri from Queens of The Stone Age) as well as singer/lyricist for this outfit, and his production talents shine through on this album even more than they did on the last Dwarves platter, 2000’s excellent-in-places ‘Come Clean.’ With a head full of every kind of popular and unpopular music you can imagine, Dahlia throws a load of different sounds through the mix – surf guitar, industrial, death metal, 60s British pop, white noise, hip-hop, hardcore and pop-punk and (most impressively) church organs (amongst other sounds and musical genres) to create a musically brilliant confection that really stands out amidst the stale ranks of America’s current tedious shitty shiny happy punker same-three-chord soundalike outfits like fucking Blink 182 and Good Charlotte and Bowling For Soup.

Dahlia has been around the Yank punk scene a long time, and is pretty disgusted and disgruntled with the way it’s been co-opted into slick dickless fangless ball-less bullshit by bands like the ones just listed. He was shooting smack and doing gigs naked back in the inglory daze of Sub Pop, causing sonic chaos from sea to shining sea alongside the likes of Nirvana (see the documentary Kurt And Courtney for some hilarious vintage violent Dwarves footage), and he finds the current crop of young pretenders to the punk throne to be utterly risible and pathetic.

However, it must be said that when you reach your late 30s like Dahlia, complaining about how the youth are“easily impressed” and how you “don’t ride a skateboard” and “don’t give a fuck about punk rocking no more” comes off as being a crotchety old man railing at the kids about how they can never have it as good as things were back in the violent day, what with public sex acts during gigs and putting members of the audience in hospital during entertaining brawls, amidst other atrocities. Still, he’s an elder statesman(iac) for the Old Skool Nihilist Punk, so I suppose he gets to gripe and grumble a bit about the sanitization of the violent scumpunk scene (he was a contemporary of the late lewd legendary lunatic GG Allin) into songs about how you can’t get a girlfriend and your parents make you mow the lawn.

Lyrically, ‘The Dwarves Must Die’ is about the usual Dahlia staples, a complete X-ray of the Dwarves-concern part of his diseased Catholic brain: sex, drugs, too-young females, how hard and great The Dwarves are, fucked-up youth, and Jesus Christ (though not necessarily in that order). The singer mostly eschews beautifully poetic zingers like “I need to come into town on a bronco that felt like a thousand years” (from the song ‘Cain Novocaine’) and makes a somewhat ill advised foray into rap-influenced wordwork during a few songs here. However, the feeling that the man isn’t taking everything too seriously (“The childish defiling the mild” as he puts it) and the fact he uses rhymes like “I’m Def like Beethoven/dumb like hardcore/that’s all I can stands I can’t stands no more” (the latter in the voice of Popeye) allows you to let him off the hook. Mostly.

But ultimately...this is a truly fucking great album and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anybody with a strong stomach, a sick sense of humor, a love of chaos and an appreciation for the hitherto-unexplored way that stuff like hymns and hip-hop can be thrown together to create a refreshing, invigorating new sound that beats the living shit out of all recent half-assed contenders for the crown of Music(k) Bad Boys. Plus. How can you argue with a cover that has a crucified midget (the inimitable star of three Dwarves album covers, Bobby Faust) surrounded by three weeping naked greased-down super-fuckable-looking women? The wannabe-anarchic youth would do well to note such shock schlock tactics...after all, a wee bit of controversy never did record sales any harm, eh?

Graham Rae is a 35-year-old Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and is halfway through his first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 17 years, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his rambles/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.