Release Date: 17th November 2023
With forty odd years in the business to their name already you’d expect some trailing off of passion for the music industry. It’s pretty broken after all. Thankfully not everyone feels that way with American underground punk legends Dwarves being a prime example of this. Not content with more than four decades worth of material, they’ve decided to not only release a new album, but make it a full 20 track, fully length concept album….called Concept Album.
At just over 37 minutes in total, the 20 tracks that are contained within the record are all proper, old school punk length tracks with ‘All For Dwarves’, the album’s final track, being the longest at neatly 10% of the run time. Yep, that’s right, three minutes and 17 seconds on one track. Craziness. That’s not how it starts though, a 33 second intro precedes ‘Feeling Great’, the first real track on the album and it is evident from here that it isn’t just the song length that’s pretty old school. This one is a softer, more rock based track. Though who doesn’t love a good reference to self-gratification in their music?
‘Voodoo’ and ‘Terrorist of Love’ follow and rev up the guitars significantly. The former feeling like a shot out of nowhere following the softer opener. One of the strongest tracks on the album, ‘Ages Ago’, follows the fast paced nature of the previous pair of tracks but brings in much more catchiness, even before ‘Dead To Me’ dials up the Stranglers vibes.
The pair of tracks in the middle of the album, ‘Kill Or Be Killed’ and ‘Roxette’, showcase two entirely different styles of punk. The former being the faster, balls out version with the later bringing in a more synthy vibe, not soft but not as hard hitting. Both styles are used aplenty on Concept Album, ensuring that there’s no possibility of drifting away from it. ‘Sixteen’ is another prime example of this. A classic rock, punk infusion that doesn’t sound anything like the rest of the piece, though feels perfectly in keeping with the album. A tough line to walk and one that is done well throughout.
If someone said ‘this album is a 70s punk album made in 2023’ then this is what you would expect for sure. No, it’s not as musically filthy as it would have been decades ago. Recording has come on a long way since then. No, it’s not as venomous and politically enraged as it would have been decades ago. The people making this album have grown up a fair bit since then. What it is though is a high quality and fun release from a band with more experience per member than most bands gain in their whole career. Give it a spin and maybe pick it up on their Bandcamp.