Dirty & Divine

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.