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THE DWARVES
‘The Dwarves Are Born Again’
(Greedy)
Your safest bet is to avoid this album, go nowhere near it or anyone who had anything to do with making it: they are bad, bad people, and, like sticking your dick in a $20 hooker, will only lead you to trouble. Excuse the analogy, but this is a Dwarves album and you’ll find much worse. Oh so much worse.
“A cure for cancer or for AIDS/ to volunteer in fire brigades,” ponders frontman Blag Dahlia on the opening track, before deciding, “let’s just get high and fuck some sluts.” And this is just track one! It’s called ‘The Dwarves Are Still The Best Band Ever’, and the scary thing is they may just be right, because 25 years into a ‘career’ that should have lasted ten minutes The Dwarves, alone in their field, “like turd in swimming pool”, are virtually untouchable.
Six years on from the last slab of horrid genius, ‘The Dwarves Must Die’, ‘…Born Again’ maintains much the same formula, and, like it’s predecessor, the same feeling that you should wash your hands after touching it. Because make no mistake, like the aforementioned hooker, this new album is utterly infectious. “Your 15 minutes are up”, tick, tick, tick, “we’re here to tell you, you suck!” tick, tick, tick… That one’s going to be stuck in your head like the later stages of syphilis. It’s called ‘15 Minutes’ and clocks in at less than a minute. And it’s that way with pretty much every song, each and every one of them a nasty little rash that just won’t go away.
The clever bit is that The Dwarves disguise most of their tunes as throwaway -three minutes or less of obnoxious pop punk with some sing-a-long swearing, blink and you’ll miss it -but there are elements and flavours of multiple genres, all very carefully layered and often camouflaged. Don’t be fooled by the nudity and mayhem, these boys know exactly what they’re doing and probably have done since 1997’s classic ‘The Dwarves Are Young And Good Looking’. Phil Spector got it wrong with The Ramones, if he was even attempting this, but here is a record that is polished without being cleaned, like the difference between trailering a car to a custom show or driving it there. The Dwarves drive it like they stole it with the top down and the radio blasting nothing but hits. “LAPD is after me! Let’s get this party started!”
Bad, bad people. Bless them.