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Review of “The Cage” by Dirt Poor Robins
One Night In The Aural Theatre: Dirt Poor Robins Create A World Of Their Own In The Cage
We did the liner notes that way because we felt it enhanced the experience of listening to the music. It’s designed to answer some questions and create new ones; to build a mystery.
— Neil Robins
These are interesting days in the music business. Although physical CD sales still dominate commerce, internet downloads gain ground monthly. Artists and record companies have tried to reverse this trend with “enhanced” CDs and promotional DVDs included in the package, along with posters, stickers and all kinds of cheap incentives.
But “cinematic rock” band Dirt Poor Robins, who don’t mind at all if you download their new album The Cage from iTunes, nevertheless know how to encourage listeners to buy their CD or at least purchase every single digital track: by reviving the concept album format and creating songs that tell a compelling story together.
Think about it: we don’t download individual scenes from movies or stick DVDs in huge multi-disc players so we can skip from scene to scene of random films. We do that with music because somewhere along the way recording artists quit telling coherent stories with their albums in favor of creating “hit” singles.
Enter Astonish Entertainment recording artists Dirt Poor Robins and their album The Cage, which, as noted by Kate Robins on their website “… revolves around a carnival sideshow, but the people in it aren’t freaks of nature. They’re normal people like you and me, but what’s being exploited is their defense mechanisms against pain and loneliness.”
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Husband and wife team Kate and Neil wrote every song save the classic Lennon-McCartney study on desolation and loneliness, “Eleanor Rigby,” which starts the record strong with sizzling guitar work by Neil after a brief, climax-building “Prologue.”
Kate’s liner notes are, literally, transcendent: a “Bill of the Play” that informs the listener and transforms the music into an aurally cinematic experience — an old-time radio play on steroids. She introduces us to a series of characters, telling us, as we journey into the printed song lyrics, which characters are “on stage,” who is singing, who is coming and going: The Grind Pitcher, the Fading Starlet, the Astonishing Aquiline Boy, the Two-Faced Lovers and more, all described in rhyme.
Really transcendent? Yes. It’s one thing to hear, in “Great Vacation:”
Dear Mr. Thoughtless, there’s some things you shouldn’t say
for the judge can hear you, and it soon will be the day.
He’ll bring the words you spoke and lay them at your feet:
syllables and decibels, he didn’t miss a beat
but it colors the story differently to know that the character singing here is The Dastardly Doomsayer, who, according to our playbill note (impressive in its alliteration) is:
Hiding behind the judgment of all
He feeds the fire that fuels their fall
“That’s all fine,” you say, “but can the music stand on its own?”
The music is big, bold, catchy and excellently executed. Both Neil’s guitar work and Kate’s vocals display an amazing clarity of tone, dulcet yet vigorous, and this duo (who contributed “Evergreen” to Sojourn’s Before the Throne ) shows their multi-faceted talents as Kate adds piano on a couple songs and Neil paints compelling textures with bass, cello, double bass, piano, vocals and percussion. A few other musicians perform on the occasional track, including No More Kings front man Pete Mitchell.
Do the songs “stick to the ribs?” Consider that the afore-mentioned “Great Vacation” is catchy enough for my nine-year old son to sing for hours while riding in the car, playing video games, doing homework or eating supper. “Great Vacation” competes equally on his internal play list with something that, he tells me, comes from High School Musical 2.
And yet the totality of presentation — music, lyrics, arrangement — had me wondering if this was some rare and complex Beatles gem they’d dusted off until I learned that Neil wrote it.
Dirt Poor Robins excel at word play and double meanings, with a sense of irony like a good country songwriter, as in “When All Is Said And Done:”
Everybody’s strung out, and everybody frets
but there is no music without tension in the neck
Many of their songs are near hymn-like in metrical precision, with a wealth of rhyme, including internal rhymes that carry from line to line. And the writing is not only tight but robust, largely because it is often scenic and multi-sensory. In this quatrain from “Loud is the World,” every sense but “smell” is directly engaged:
Loud is the world, it always bleeds through:
a tainted replacement for that which is true.
And I let it hold me and whisper its lies;
it feeds what is dead in this flesh I despise.
And then there is that internal rhyme — here, the repeating long “I” that end-rhymes in the quatrain above, then moves to the body of each line in the next (and quite appropriately do they choose the “I” vowel sound, since pride is this character’s affliction):
Yet there’s a light in this smothering black
that guides and revives and provides what I lack.
But as soon as I find, once again I am lost;
I’m drowning in waves of temptation. I’m tossed.
This song leads to the anthemic, fist-pumping rock of “Aquiline (Rise Up),” where Kate, now playing the character Aquiline, borrows from the book of Job before belting the chorus out from a verse in Isaiah 40, the same chapter that the Doomsayer borrowed imagery from for a much different purpose in “Great Vacation.” Dylanesque in its biblical allusions, “Aquiline (Rise Up)” could be the soundtrack to Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones, calling the skeletal remains to life.
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The Cage is ultimately a hopeful record. Several palette-cleansing, scene-changing short takes like “Tah Dah” and “Last Night (I Couldn’t Let It Rest)” segue the listener onto the next stage of this aural play-film-carnival, everything leading to “Love Again” where Aquiline and the Fading Starlet seem to get the upper hand over the Grind Pitcher, who is still preaching his “gospel of woe.”
My final recommendation: pretend its 1973 and people still buy an LP from the record store, go home and call a best friend or two to come over, slip the vinyl on the turntable and engage the album from start to finish rather than treat it as white noise while doing other things.
Put this disc in your CD player or throw the whole thing on your iPod if you must. Then read the Bill of the Play and enter into this story, just as if you were reading a novel or watching a DVD. Later on, these songs will make for fine background music as you drive to the grocery store or sweat out some calories on Stairmaster, but not at first. This is, after all, Cinematic Rock. Sit down and enjoy the show.
written by Bobby Gilles, reprinted from the Jan/Feb. 2008 Travelogue