In the serried, sold-out crowd, Brody Dalle's first two songs tonight are met with polite whoops but no great enthusiasm. Rat Race, the first track on her imminent debut solo album, Diploid Love, is a chugging slow-burner. The verses are understated, with the punk singer skulking behind her bleached hair, but Dalle's customary holler is unbelted in the chorus. It's rather good.
Song two, Don't Mess With Me, is even better – an out-and-out pop cut from Diploid Love that retains Dalle's sense of menace. Five years since her last record, Dalle, who used to trade as the Distillers, and then Spinnerette, still sounds like she's gargling chopped liver, in the best possible way. Three songs in, though, and everyone finally goes nuts. I Am a Revenant is an old song from 2002, when Dalle's hair was jet black, she fronted a raucous punk band – that's the Distillers – and she had only one speed: fast. Smouldering was not in their skill set.
As anyone with an audience will tell you, change is hard to pull off. Growing a sound is, perhaps, hardest for those musicians operating in a niche genre, where a defence of the realm's core beliefs forms a big part of membership. Diversify, and risk excommunication. Punk rock is particularly hard to outrun, and not just because it races along so quickly. There are rules, and they are unbending, often transforming spring-heeled rebellion into ossified retrenchment.
Dalle is punk embodied; as a troubled teenager, the Australian was in a self-taught all-girl band, Sourpuss. Under the tutelage of Rancid's Tim Armstrong, Californian punk's Mr Big, Dalle upped sticks and moved to LA for a life of riffing. Her Distillers recorded three albums and were eventually tipped for a mainstream crossover around the time of 2003's fine Coral Fang album, which was to be their last. Quite apart from the lip piercings, tattoos and weaponised hair, Dalle's tar-throated vocals sang of defiance, in chantable nuggets that veered from the personal to the political. She was, pretty much, the only female doing this in front of a large audience.
Thanks to her holler, the guitar in her hands, and the crossover potential, comparisons with Courtney Love have dogged Dalle. These only intensified as Dalle tried to break out of punk rock's more restrictive shackles after the Distillers disbanded amid personal pressures and a crystal meth habit, she recently revealed. Last time around, on Dalle's Spinnerette album and band project of 2009, the attempt at a gear change did not go smoothly. Ghetto Love, from that era, sounds surprisingly evergreen tonight, as Brody loses her guitar for a song and tries to persuade people to dance to a fierce bubblegum stomper. But the rest of the project was met with hoots of derision, especially from punk fundamentalists. Their reaction might have been mixed up with issues of loyalty, since Dalle had swapped the controlling embrace of Armstrong for the more enlightened touch of Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), with whom she now has two children.
Diploid Love is a far better record than Spinnerette was – cogent, taut, nuanced, smouldering. It's being released on the revamped Caroline label, which is also home to 50 Cent, of all people. Dalle played a lot of the instrumental parts herself; there are, in addition, electronic elements burbling throughout, and a mariachi band provides brass. Sadly, they don't appear tonight.
Instead, Dalle and her live band – Tony Bevilacqua, a survivor both of the Distillers and Spinnerette campaigns, drummer Hayden Scott, and bassist Cosmo Sylvan – play the new songs like the Distillers might have, tossing out the nuances in favour of crowd-pleasing muscularity and, in the process, making this rebirth only partial.
Live Parties for Prostitutes is a funereal march that has, somehow, been chosen as a single; that logic makes much more sense when you hear the song on headphones than when you hear it live. Everything tonight is heads-down and straight ahead, which robs the more throbbing new cuts – Blood in Gutters, for one – of their impact. They just sound slow.
By the final number – "This is the encore," Dalle snarls, one song previously – the old and new Dalles have found a happier medium: pace and melody; swagger and soaring vocals. Underworld misses the lovely brass outro of its recorded incarnation, but for now Dalle is sticking to this no-frills iteration of her new sound.
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