The Dirtbombs - Party Store – In The Red - ??? - ****

Mick Collins, The Dirtbombs' front-man, is one of American garage punk's lone black voices.
In 2001, the Detroit band's Ultraglide In Black album hot-wired Seventies soul standards with scratchy guitars. Ten years later, Party Store offers chunky analogue facsimiles of famous Detroit techno tunes of the Eighties, attempting another cross-cultural hybridisation.
It's a fantastic conceit, digital music deprogrammed, Kraftwerk in reverse. Men are driven to drum like machines. Snatches of sampled song are imprecisely vocalised.
Pulverised guitars ape inexactly electronic noise. And a twenty minute slash at Carl Craig's Bug In The Bassbin sheds and shreds The Dirtbombs' punk straightjacket.

(23/1/11)