Hamilton’s The Dirty Nil blazed their way through a fuzz-laden, sweat-soaked 40-minute set at Café Deckuf on Feb. 7.
And what a show it was. Ottawa punk act Celery Troff warmed the stage with a wild half-hour set, semi-dressed in semi-drag. The frontman, who looked suspiciously like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, writhed and flailed about the space, ensuring no sound was left unexplored, no matter how imperfect.
Then came The Nil. If Matthew Shultz of Cage the Elephant smoked a pack a day for five years, Dave Grohl had only a three-piece kit to work with, and Sid Vicious could actually play the bass, and they somehow came together to make music, they’d probably sound somewhere damn close to Hamilton’s The Dirty Nil.
The grunge-slinging trio first took to the airwaves with the 2011 single, “Fuckin’ Up Young.” Fan-favourite and show-closer, the song was the Nil’s “first blood.”
“It felt like the first kind of statement of what the Dirty Nil is,” bassist/vocalist Dave Nardi said of the release.
The three garage-rockers, Nardi, guitarist/lead vocalist Luke Bentham, and drummer Kyle Fisher, gathered around a table at the rear of the downtown venue to discuss their latest venture, a 7” split release with Welland, Ont. band Northern Primitive, released just last month.
Fisher recalled the joint effort fondly: “In the words of Ross Miller, their bass player, ‘It’s like people can now buy our friendship in physical format.’”
Released on Indoor Shoes Records, the split was a group project from start to finish. Nardi even did the artwork for it.
“It’s just kind of friends helping each other out, and coming together for a project,” Fisher said.
Bentham and Nardi were alight with flashing fretwork as the band tore into “Zombie-Eyed,” The Nil’s delightfully muddy half of January’s split. Imagining a trained songbird with his vocal chords twisted, tangled and scratched lends an idea of what Bentham’s unique, throttling snarl sounds like.
“The easiest way I could put it is the day I stopped caring about it is the day I started getting good at it,” remarked Bentham on his breakneck singing style.
“You either learn to do it or you fuckin’ die.”
The Nil’s thundering sound goes well with their lightning-rod stage antics. The soft-spoken, friendly individuals become foreign entities altogether, masters of their domain. The electricity and unity between the three is blatant, the essence of which they tried to capture while recording.
“We feed off each other so much that the only way we ever thought it would work would be to do it where we could all look each other in the face and kind of roll with the punches,” Nardi said of recording, which he explained happened “between beers.”
“Luke doesn’t even remember the vocal takes,” Fisher said with a laugh.
“Or so the legend goes,” Bentham grinned.
No rock show is complete without a shirt coming off- and even if it was Fisher’s, it was met with no shortage of catcalls and whoops.
As for 2013, the band has their eyes south of the border.
“We’re definitely going to be hitting the States, that’s the plan,” Bentham said.
“There’ll be a new record in the new year,” Nardi said. “Whether it’s another 7” or an EP, there’ll be new music out for sure.”
“And shirts!” Bentham added.
“And beats!” Fisher finished.
