Review Summary: Aside from one or two sore spots, The Dirty Nil delivers another high-octane, enjoyable rock album. Just don't expect it to have much staying power.
Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat:
The Lash is by no means a bad album; I even found it to be quite enjoyable at times. The guitar work on the record is very solid - the riffs on
Gallop of the Hounds and
I Was a Henchman are catchy as hell and serve as the driving force powering their respective songs. Fun, straightforward rock songs like these are what The Dirty Nil does best. They're the kind of songs you’d want to show to your fifty-something-year-old uncle who’s constantly making claims of rock being dead, and who pines for the “good old days” of Van Halen and AC/DC.
However, the unfortunate reality is that
The Lash brings absolutely nothing new to the table (not even relative to The Dirty Nil’s own discography), and there’s very little variety throughout. Most, if not all songs follow the typical structure of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge/solo-chorus. And although there are only a couple songs I believe to be subjectively bad, there are only one or two songs that I’d consider meaningful standouts worth coming back to.
Normally I would consider a 29 minute runtime to be on the short side of what’s acceptable for a full-length LP, but for
The Lash, it feels like just the right length considering the album’s lack of variety. The Dirty Nil arguably does nothing at all outside their comfort zone on this album, except for maybe
This Is Me Warning Ya and
Spider Dream. The latter is a decent, albeit forgettable soft-rock song, while the former is unfortunately the album’s low point. The song is placed very awkwardly on the tracklist (it’s between the two most upbeat songs on the album) and it goes on for far too long. It would’ve worked better if they cut the length in half and made it into an interlude of sorts in the second half of the album.
Overall,
The Lash is a decent rock album, but not one I see myself returning to very often, if at all. In the future, when I find myself in the mood for this style of straightforward rock music, I have to imagine I’m more likely going to listen to the classics over an album like this. It’s an enjoyable half hour of rock, there’s just very little reason to believe
The Lash will have any staying power in the rest of the 2020’s and beyond.
3 out of 5
