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Dirty & Divine is the fourth and final studio album by British band Moonshake. It was released through C/Z Records in the USA and World Domination Enterprises in the UK.

Background[edit]

Following the 1994 release of Moonshake's third album, The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow, drummer Mig Morland had left the band in order to join Moose, leaving David Callahan entirely in charge as the only remaining founder member. Moonshake also parted company with their long-term record label, Too Pure. The band entered a state of flux as regards stability and membership, with Callahan remembering "there were one or two people like [saxophonist and flute player] Ray Dickaty who were constants from then on. But it really ended up being like The Fall or Stereolab, where there were constantly people coming in and out of the band all the time, which is not how I wanted it. I wanted a core that we could work with all the time."^[1]

Callahan admitted that the band's specific functional dynamic (with instrumental parts subordinated to carefully-crafted sampler loops and soundscapes) made this period particularly difficult in practical terms. "I had to audition people all the time, and then we had to do more rehearsals. Every time someone new came in the band, we'd have to rehearse. Often, we were playing to clicks and samples that were rigidly looped. And that meant that we had to be rigidly rehearsed, and the drummers had to wear headphones and really be locked in with the samples, which takes quite a lot of work. Laika^[a] did the opposite thing, where they pared down the samples a bit and then started triggering them by hand. That was a wiser way of doing it. But unfortunately, a lot of the samples I'd be using were very rhythmic, and you couldn’t really play them by hand because then they'd be out of time. So I was stuck. A lot of the things I was doing had seven or eight loops all programmed to be in and out of time with each other at certain points, and the poor drummer and the rest of the band had to try and cope with that."^[1]

Seeing the American sector of his audience as being larger and more receptive, Callahan had begun to focus more on an American career — "we were finding these audiences that had been into post-hardcore in the late '80s and were tired of mainstream rock and seemed to be waiting for bands like us to come along and go a bit more out there."^[1]. As part of this process, Moonshake had signed to the Seattle-based indie label C/Z Records (which was determined to promote them in America) rather than to a British label.

The version of Moonshake which recorded Dirty & Divine consisted of Callahan, Dickaty, bass guitarist Matt Brewer (who'd been with the band since 1994) and new drummer Michael Rother (who'd joined in late 1995). Stereolab's Katherine Gifford — who'd sung on The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow and had been part of the live band, on and off, since 1994 — contributed a backing vocal on one song but was otherwise not involved.

Writing and recording[edit]

Dirty & Divine was recorded "on and off" at River Recordings in Bermondsey, London between December 1995 and February 1996. It contained various songs which had been played in the Moonshake set during the previous two years, with subjects ranging from sailor's tales, the lives and deaths of cities, addictions to risk and danger, and sexual fantasy in advertising. Notably, although Callahan wrote all of the lyrics, most of the music was credited to all of the band members: previous albums had credited only Callahan or Margaret Fiedler, his original songwriting foil between 1990 and 1993.

Regarding his approach on this album, Callahan has commented "I wanted to empty it out a bit. I was still aiming to fulfil my goal of actually writing songs with the samples, which I probably did the most on Dirty & Divine. Sometimes, on The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow, I'd make up a bassline, put some words to that, and then try and fit a lot of the samples around it. On Dirty & Divine I started off just combining samples that I liked and playing with them. The songs are all written that way. They start from the connections between the samples before the band gets to play on them... (There's) some great songs on there."^[1] Some pieces, such as "Cranes" and "Exotic Siren Song", had already been played at Moonshake live shows.

In addition to Gifford's single backing vocal (on "Cranes"), further female back-up vocals were provided by her Stereolab bandmate Mary Hansen (on "Exotic Siren Song") and by Kate Blackshaw (on "The Taboo"), the latter having worked with Callahan in 1988 on The Wolfhounds' 1988 EP Son of Nothing.^[2][3] "The Taboo" also featured trumpet and flugelhorn from Pauline Smith, who'd previously contributed to records by Dream City Film Club and Collapsed Lung.^[4]

Releases[edit]

Dirty & Divine was released on 21 May 1996 on C/Z Records and later licensed to a UK release through World Domination Recordings.

Unlike the other Moonshake albums, Dirty & Divine has not received a reissue as a download. The album has now been out of print for many years, with no immediate reissue planned.

Dirty & Divine would later spawn a remix compilation album on C/Z Records in 1999, two years after Moonshake had split up. Remixes featured remixes of Dirty & Divine tracks by Robin Guthrie, Rich Costey, Main, Todd Nickolas, Lucid and John McEntire.^[5][6]

Critical reception[edit]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
Boston Phoenix	[7]
AllMusic	[8]
Shfl	(favourable)[9]

Contemporary reviews[edit]

Awarding the album three stars, Matt Ashare of the Boston Phoenix wrote "synth samples, serpentine riffs from an electronically treated saxophone, dub-inflected bass, and a collage of man- and machine-made rhythm tracks — that's the foundation upon which David Callahan has been building Moonshake for the past five years. Like Stereolab, whose former member Katherine Gifford duets with Callahan on the hypnotic opening track of Dirty & Divine, Moonshake got their start blending organic guitar drones and synthetic keyboards. But when founding Moonshaker Margaret Fiedler went off to form Laika in 1994, she took the guitar with her, leaving Callahan to push his cinematic vision of the urban landscape further into the realm of skewed sampling. Dirty & Divine relies equally on Callahan's skills as a noirish storyteller with a taste for minimalist poetry, a tasteful arranger, and a restrained crooner. (Imagine The Fall's Mark E. Smith with a Cole Porter fixation and a much better voice.) His muse is the seductive ebb and flow of mechanized city life. He serenades industrial girders and the machines that put them there in 'Cranes,' swings from a 21st-floor balcony in 'Up for Anything', and celebrates a life of crime in 'House on Fire'. Each of these is set against such a compelling groove that, for the first time, Moonshake sound like a band rather than an experiment in sonic architecture."^[7]

Retrospective reviews[edit]

In Allmusic, Tim DiGravina writes "Dirty & Divine isn't Moonshake's strongest album, if only because main man Dave Callahan seems locked in the same harsh tones and grooves throughout its nine tracks. Relying more than ever on cacophony and noise, the band seems to have created a concept album for the dancefloor based on the sound of grinding gears and industrial noise. Callahan's vocals and rhyme-heavy lyrics will make or break the album for a listener. He appears to be completely uninterested in harmonizing with his guest vocalist, Stereolab's Mary Hansen, [whose] voice is mostly quite hard to differentiate in the mix, as it's buried deeper than PJ Harvey's background vocals on The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow. With Callahan wailing and whining over the groundwork of decadent, noisy jazz shuffles, the vocals are an acquired taste to be sure. With Margaret Fiedler and Guy Fixsen now long-lost to Laika, the continuation of the sound ethics that duo helped create begins to show signs of weakness."^[8]

Continuing his theme, DiGravina concluded "the music is uncannily similar to the music of Laika, only more confrontational and with fewer pop elements. The album's most successful songs are 'Cranes' and 'Up for Anything'. The former's everything-and-the-kitchen-sink vibes and exotic eclecticism make for a suave five minutes, while the latter's Middle Eastern flutes, processed vocals, and deep bass punch create an almost tangible sense of dread. If the lesser tracks never sink to the level of sludge, there is an over-reliance on sirens, sound effects, and dance beats that ultimately drags the album down. Still, there's a certain compelling, dreary charm in the album's buzzy funk dementia. Fans of music that makes a racket will find bliss here. Many others will probably decry the lack of variation as they question why Callahan didn't pass the mic a little more often."^[8]

Writing in Shfl, Jon Dale comments "something about Dirty & Divine has always made me think of an alternate route out of Public Image Ltd.'s Metal Box — deep, dub-wise bass; rhythms that chop and churn; Keith Levene's guitar replaced by a dense threading of samples. But David Callahan isn't John Lydon, thankfully, though his abstract takes on urban dread do overlap with Lydon's soured poetry at times. Dirty & Divine is Moonshake breathing out after the suffocation of its predecessor, The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow, and while there’s a through-line from that album's drunken jazz studies to the muezzin wail of (what seems to be) brass and woodwind sampled here, it feels less claustrophobic, somehow."^[9]

Track listing[edit]

Personnel[edit]

Credits adapted from liner notes.^[10]

Moonshake

• David Callahan - vocals, drum & sample programming
• Raymond M. Dickaty – tenor saxophone, flute
• Matt Brewer – bass guitar
• Michael Rother – drums

Additional musicians

• Mary Hansen – “Radio 2” vocals (Exotic Siren Song)trumpet, saxophones
• Katherine Gifford – harmony vocals (Cranes)
• Kate Blackshaw – “South Pacific” vocals (The Taboo)
• Pauline Smith – flugelhorn & trumpet (The Taboo)

Production

• David Callahan – production
• Howard Fox – engineering, mixing

Artwork and design

• Caroline Schutz – artwork

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Eva Luna at Discogs (list of releases)

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