Vinyl LP
The Drin began as a means for Dylan McCartney to record the songs he was working on after his band Mardou broke up. In addition to being one-third of The Serfs, formerly the drummer for Vacation and currently for Motorbike, the prolific McCartney was chasing an elusive muse through the streets of his native Cincinnati, Ohio. Under The Drin moniker, McCartney brings all of his musical preoccupations to the surface: Subterranean garage rock, eccentric art punk, menacing dub, and bleak, tender ballads all take turns in the spotlight. The Drin albums are sprawling forays, teeming with industrial-folk-dub anthems written in the shadow of decades-old factories that still occasionally thrum with life.
Elude The Torch is The Drin’s fifth album in four years, the follow-up to 2023’s dark horse front-runner Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom. While all of The Drin’s releases have featured Dakota Carlyle—McCartney’s foil in the Serfs and Crime of Passing—Elude The Torch is the first to feature the six-piece band that McCartney has fashioned into a tight touring unit. The actual debut of this sextet came with a post-Venom live-in-the-studio set recorded by Vacation’s Jerry Westerkamp. For “37 Buried At Helltown”, the group ran through a collection of Drin favorites and the result is something akin to Happy Mondays playing the catalog of Pere Ubu.
Without forsaking The Drin’s downcast tendencies, Elude The Torch flickers with cautious hope. The title track never lets up as Carlyle’s drums push The Clean-like guitar figure to its limit. “Tomorrow’s Just Laughin’” flips that script into something like the Incredible String Band taking a stab at the Anthology of American Folk Music. “Comb The Wreckage” distills the gray Midwestern dub that has always been a focus of The Drin, but a lovely guitar line floats through the sunlight, lifting the song off the dirt and soot of the factory floor; take another look at that oily puddle before you step over it, there might be a rainbow shimmering inside. “Tigers Cage” hijacks a sleazy Stones riff and sends it flying into outer space wrapped up in a cocoon of squiggling synths and pleasant saxophone drone. Delving back into the dub zone, the melodica gets a nice workout on the dreamy and dissolute “Scars of Places,” while “Lease on Life” goes for a late-night meander with Spacemen 3. The final track, “No One Knows For Sure/Prato Della Valle,” finds The Drin wayfaring down the road, a little bit older, a little bit wiser, and in search of new adventures.
