A Very Special OTD X-Mas: Dirty Holiday

Published Dec 20 2005, 01:31 AM by webteam

Is there any dirtier holiday than this one? (Photo by Amy Wallenberg)

We're being cute -- this is not a Christmas song -- but hear us out.

First we heard the guys in Officer May were changing their name. Then we heard they were changing their sound. Neither of these seemed like particularly welcome possibilities, because Officer May -- who managed to be loud, poingnant, ass-dirty, tragic, and gorgeous in a Shellac-meets-In Utero kinda way -- kicked the shit out of us on a regular basis. So to find out that they were changing both name and sound was, seriously, a bummer. Then again, we thought, how different could it be?

Pretty different. Frontkid Chris Warren put out put out about 100 copies of a solo album a while back, and if you heard him around town sketching those songs alone on guitar and piano, then the new band will make a lot of sense. In DIRTY HOLIDAY, he's split the difference between the sounds of filthy rock bands and introspective song-poets. Warren looks a bit like a cross between Kurt Cobain and Mark Lanegan, and has that kind of voice, too -- weathered, whiskey/smoked, wry, heartbreaking. This song -- taken from their debut album American Vulture -- sounds a little like those guys, a little like the Doors' "People Are Strange," and a little like the song you'd whistle on the last stagecoach out of Deadwood.

LISTEN: Dirty Holiday, "Who's Pulling the Strings" (mp3)