Review Summary: A puddle of dirty water can be deceptively unworthy of notice.
"We like to play with each other in our basement," the little blurb on Black Dirty's tame Bandcamp page touts. While the sexual innuendo is obvious, it nonetheless succeeds in conjuring up the image of several young but talented musicians playing their hearts out to a nonexistent audience in a dark and perhaps dirty sublevel room. It's music for the sake of good music, and their existence signifies an incorrigible truth; there are plenty of talented musicians out there playing really fun music, but lots of it remains buried in obscurity.
Black Dirty is a four piece math rock band of the same ilk as loads of talented but relative unknowns that choose to freely give out their music on websites such as Bandcamp just so people can even hear them. Introspective vocals float over intricate and twinkly instrumentals, with slight tinges of emo and dreamy pop. It's a very soft and nostalgic sound that can be described as unassuming, as it panders to a surprisingly wide array of tastes while still remaining very musically proficient in of itself. While plenty of math rock can occasionally delve into the no-man's-land of pretentiousness, it would be a stretch for even a diehard skeptic to accuse Black Dirty of treading such unnecessarily murky waters. For behind every complicated intertwining guitar passage, every off-kilter percussion section, or every mesmerizingly sung line, there are hooks aplenty that are purposed to engage listeners and promote head bobbing. The end result is seen in the form of their very short Dirty Water EP, in which accessibility and technicality collide; very much so like the fusion of the giant squid and the whale on the cover, two entities at odds with each other have found a quirky sort of reconciliation in math pop.
