Brooklyn’s Dirty on Purpose cannot help but make elegant compositions out of simple ingredients. Layers of multi-tracked vocals, glittering melodies, and a subtlety of drone stack up in each song. This could be called space rock if it weren’t so firmly grounded in the terrestrial. It’s better described as dream-pop because the songs celebrate many of our earthly delights but viewed, perhaps, through the haze of a dream or memory. Hallelujah Sirens is a smart collection of songs which could be campfire serenades, lakeside dirges, or starry-eyed minuets.
Dirty on Purpose concentrate on musical themes instead of concepts. Something about lakes, lights, and looking saturates the songs. It’s nothing particularly weighty, but rather good fodder for songs about sweet memories without being too sentimental. “Light Pollution,” with its dulcet guitar aiding the drumbeat crescendo, urges to “take the long way home,” a sentiment which is in danger of being cliché but here ends up just being something universal which we have all felt, if not sung to ourselves. In fact, this particular sentiment hasn’t enjoyed such privileged championing since the Piebald classic “Holden Caufield,” a song which tended towards the more maudlin instinct which Dirty in Purpose manage to (barely) avoid. But the two songs might have more similarity than you think. Although the band is unburdened by heavy music ideas, their music is intricately executed. Threads of harmony and rhythm are interwoven expertly, making an album which sounds at once both tight and airy. The songs are not over-wrought, breathing simply but not simplistically. “Marfa Lights” recalls Eric’s Trip (the band, not the song), though that band was ironically a much dirtier and fuzzier version of Dirty on Purpose. The exchanged male/female vocals favor the comparison, but there is something more genetic to the music which draws the comparison closer. Both bands share a likeminded sense of melody, echoing each other’s hooks, though you might have to work harder to distill the melody of Eric’s Trip from their rapturous sludge.
From the liner notes, I cannot discern if there are any female singers featured on the songs. I see that there is an androgynous-sounding backup singer called Jaymay, which could be a spiced-up version of the name Jaime. But the entire time I listen to the album I swear that I can detect the distinct breathiness of a double-X chromosome. Listen to the vocal flourishes on the first four songs and tell me that you don’t envision a fey-looking female vocalist standing on stage, holding no instrument but swaying sultrily to the music. If no female element exists, then the band has an impressive vocal range of hearty tenors to near-castrati who decorate each song delicately. “Summer Dress” relies on its fragile guitar theme, notes building in unison with the vocals. Neither instrument treads too carelessly on the other and as the song reaches its end with an impressive concord, you forget how dangerously close it came to shattering the whole way through. It’s a fine balancing act, carried out consistently through 11 songs and leaving me with the conviction that buying new music based on old tropes might be worthwhile again.
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