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With such a long and foreboding title, Mediocrity is the Strongest Inevitability, you’d think Austin duo, Dirty Dancing, would have somehow managed to avoid the inevitable. Over Mediocrity’s fourteen tracks of low-fi, electro-guitar noise, they manage to demonstrate the very dangerous, intimate nature of home recording, engineering, and producing. In pouring through their long-playing catalogue, there are only a few moments, somewhere near the album’s middle torso that glimmer with a chance of hope, and that’s only if you have the accepting palate: plenty of Velvet Underground, some 80s music by groups who were really good in the 70s, and a tolerance for (art?) noise.
From the get-go, this sort of netherworld between sense and nonsense is at play as musical juxtapositions and lyrical devices teeter between relevance and novelty. In album opener, “The Merger” you get saw-blade guitars over pounding Big Beat kick drum with Schoen chanting “business as usual” in some sort of roadhouse-blues-noir collage. Where Dirty Dancing was at first engaging and ear-grabbing for their crock-pot of influence, you soon realize at the five-minute-mark that “The Merger” has no development. This becomes an issue throughout the rest of the album—as producer/engineer/musician Eric Schoen seems completely content with a single drumbeat for his antithetical, dystopic ravings, the listener becomes complacent.
The first half of the album is peppered with electro/noise forays, angular guitars, and plenty of real estate for Schoen to deliver his skewed and anti-ignorance, anti-consumerism diatribes in singing/speaking limbo. “Sit on the TV and watch the couch/open your mouth and try to think,” Schoen preaches in “Right Place & Time”. “Blood is the new black,” he sings in “Black Blood”. For the most part, Dirty Dancing stick close to their low-fi obscurity, rarely giving the listener something gratifying. By the time the duo decides to come to their senses, you’re eight songs in and it’s too late.
“Delicate Chains” is the closest thing on this album that resembles a straightforward song with a tune to it, and while the guitars are nice and melodic, the vocal line pseudo-nostalgic in Ian Curtis-style squalor, it still suffers from stagnation. “Here and There” has a somewhat satisfying crooked lullaby quality to it offering a much-needed break from the rest of the album’s furious pacing and lack of breadth, but you had to get through “Air Voice’s” dissonant interlude beforehand. Following “Chains”, Dirty Dancing kind of turns over a new leaf - or at least a different leaf, I should say - as their songs are much less rambunctious, a little less fractured, and Schoen’s musings a little more tame. He manages to work the playground, kissing chant (“…sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G”) into “Spring Heart’s Winter”, a feat I don’t know whether to chide or applaud him for.
So much of what plagues this album is in its aesthetic. Perhaps many of these tracks are better left to a live treatment such as “Atlantis” and “All Smoke and No Fire” which just sound flat given the quality of the recordings. I appreciate the subtleties of home recordings just as much as the next listener, but you usually don’t see bands that rely heavily on sonic depth pulling it off. In Mediocrity, guitars fall out of sync with the electronic drum machines providing rhythm section, vocals clip decibel levels, and instrumentation is both sparse and abrasive at the same time. There’s hardly a moment on the album where Dirty Dancing are at once definable and accessible, and maybe that’s their appeal. Many times the most difficult art to appreciate becomes the most gratifying, but judging from Mediocrity, it doesn’t seem to be a fruit worth picking.
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