Dirty Skirts transitional phase sees them "Lost in the Fall"

Many have been eagerly anticipating the launch of this new album for two reasons: one, because they're loyal fans, and two, because the live Dirty Skirts set just hasn't been the same since Rocking the Daisies 2010. During the festival they introduced us to a darker, harder sound that left many heads tilted in confusion going: "What the f$#k?" Fans of the Skirts are more familiar with their light-hearted, fun tracks that have had plenty of airplay on the radio. After Dave shared a bit of the album with us, I'm happy to report that it is still very much The Dirty Skirts - the playful indie pop-rock, however, has seen a natural progression to less playful indie rock with an edge.

Why the shift in sound?

According to Dave, it wasn't really a conscious decision: "We just allowed ourselves to be creative on this album. We've written it with a kind of disregard for any sort of expectation from our fan base or anyone else. The process has been interesting in that specific themes and ideas have emerged naturally in the music and we've supported them.

"When we play in live environments, we often improvise and often just make stuff up; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. What we normally do is restrict that to live environments, but where it's emerged now in our song-writing process, we've said, okay cool, so we've got this heavy thing, let's work with it and see where it goes."

Allowing the creative process to flow, The Dirty Skirts produced quite a bit of material and possibly even a follow-up album to "Lost in the Fall". In choosing the tracks for the album they looked at which songs had a "consistent sonic so that the album would have a theme to it, and a feeling to it, that permeated all of the songs," said Dave.

Expressing a paranoid concern

"I think, on this album we consciously tried to keep material together that was in a similar sort of mood or experience. There are themes, one of which is that there are guitar riffs, some of which are quite heavy and upbeat, and then there's a hard-soft dynamic - which is not by any means exclusive to us; it exists in a lot of our influences that go as far back as My Bloody Valentine, even The Pixies - it's this dynamic where it goes hard for a moment and then it goes soft for a moment; we've allowed that to come through in the material. Some of those themes happen to be kind of hard, some are soft, some are beautiful, some are kind of tortured - it's a little bit of it all.

"It is a bit of a paranoid concerned album; there is some awareness around what is happening on the planet, and to the planet, without being too openly preachy or claiming to have any of the answers."

This "paranoid concern" definitely comes through in the imagery used in the video for Strike the Match:

Have no fear Daddy Don't Disco lovers, Dave has assured us that there will be sufficient material on the album to appeal to their regular fans. You can expect more shared vocals between Dave and Jeremy, and a lyrical-scape that meshes the real world with the imagined one.

Transitional phase for The Skirts

The title, taken from a lyric in a new song Music Stole my Heart, "Lost in the Fall" captures the darker, more sombre sound of the album. The Dirty Skirts, according to Dave, probably won't be doing any gigs at any of the smaller clubs any longer as the band is going through a transitional phase - Dave described the title as "a poetic summation of where the band is at right now".

The Dirty Skirts decided to record "Lost in the Fall" with Brendan Roussouw at Heritage Studios after experimenting with the recording of Strike the Match and liking the end-product.

"On this recording we've allowed ourselves to be creative and, in essence, I think it's going to be more Dirty Skirts than what the last album was. We almost wanted to experiment with making mistakes and making poor production-value decisions in the pursuit of a tone that is unique to ourselves - you should hear it in the material and the songs," said Dave.

From Six Gun Sessions to national music festivals

In my opinion, The Dirty Skirts are one of the most successful bands in South Africa. From a start-up band playing the Six Gun Sessions at Mercury Lounge on a Monday night, they've come a long way. It took perseverance and a sincere love for music to get them where they are today - playing at most of the national music festivals, opening for international acts and selling out gigs abroad. What's the secret of their success?

"I guess there are fundamental drivers in any band and in there, somewhere, is a role for ego to play. The Dirty Skirts really emerged out of Jeremy and my collaboration, and our urge to write and perform music. You cannot start lower in the music business than we did; we didn't even wait until we had a proper band to pull together. We wrote our beats and our basslines on computer and we played guitar to those tracks and sang on a Monday night at the Mercury Lounge at the Six Gun Sessions. We did that a couple of times and then we moved to the Tuesday night and, eventually, we met a bassist. And so we could switch the bass off on the computer, but we still didn't have a drummer. We played gigs like that for quite some time. Eventually we found a drummer and we started to resemble a proper band.

"We've also wanted to create and be creative - that has been our main driver - have fun while we're doing it and push ourselves when we're performing our own music to actually celebrate the privilege of being on-stage and performing our own music out there.

"We love being in SA, we love performing our music in SA, we love having a fan base here in SA; we're not spending every day coveting something else. It's been a journey and a lot of the drive was a lot of the opportunities within South Africa. When we were invited years back to play Cell C Sound of the City, it was our first big gig - acknowledgement, outside of organising our own gigs like at the Independent Armchair, Mercury, The Roosevelt. It was like here's a big event, we got an invitation to play it, we jumped from playing max 500 people at a venue to playing to like 3000 - it was an incredible experience. And then you wanna play Splashy, Oppi, Rocking the Daisies and Coke Fest and there's the drive - you chase down all of those opportunities to get noticed by those festivals," said Dave.

Focus on new material

If you're in the Joburg, Cape Town, Pretoria or Durban areas, The Dirty Skirts will be taking their national launch tour to your respective cities, while shows in Stellenbosch and Port Elizabeth are yet to be confirmed. The tour will only begin in July, but you can expect the album to be available online and in stores before then.

"The launch shows are going to be focused predominantly on the new album's material, and then some stuff that we might not have played that frequently. We've put it together consciously so that it equates to an experience that's going to be supported with audio-visual material," said Dave.

After the tour, expect more visual representations of The Dirty Skirts music in the form of videos and possibly a short film. I'm really looking forward to listening to the latest offering from The Dirty Skirts; as an ardent fan of their sound I can only anticipate something wonderful. As they'll be making fewer club appearances post-album launch, I suggest you enjoy the tour; it's bound to be special.