Oftentimes, writing about music is an odd conundrum. When you love a band, you really really want everyone else to love them with you, so you do your best to explain what they sound like and why you should listen to them if you haven’t before. You want to illustrate why listening to this particular band will be a unique, enriching, and specific experience that’s worth your investigation- but how do you talk about that without comparing the band to something that already exists? How do you do that without just making up a genre of music that’s really just a string of well-intentioned aimless adjectives? How do you convey that it’s worth a listen without giving it a reductive label?
Dirty Dishes is one of those bands with which many people seem to have that problem. We recently chatted with Jenny Tuite and Alex Molini of the beloved Boston-bred rock outfit on the weirdness of labels, losing band members, and moving across the country in anticipation of their new record Guilty, due out January 27 on Exploding in Sound.
Allston Pudding: How’s your day going so far?
Jenny Tuite: Pretty good, it’s raining really hard in LA.
Alex Molini: Yeah, this is the third time it’s rained here in LA…
AP: Ever?
AM: …Yeah it feels like it! Since we’ve been here. Still single digits.
AP: So how long have you guys been in LA now?
AM: About two years now I think.
AP: How’s it going so far?
AM: It’s cool, we like it. It’s almost always sunny, except for today.
JT: We miss the east coast scene though…it’s a lot different out here, but it’s cool.
AM: Very.
AP: What would you say are some of the main differences between the two scenes (especially the Boston DIY scene) and what’s going on out in California? I have to be honest, I don’t really know much about west coast scenes at all.
AM: Well, in terms of the DIY thing, we haven’t really done much DIY here, except for a few things. It’s pretty much all clubs and bars and stuff like that…so that’s another reason why we miss the East Coast so much.
JT: Well there are no basements here.
AM: Yeah so it’s much more disconnected here, there’s not a sense of widespread community amongst the fans.
AP: Do you think it’s had an impact on your music, being surrounded by a different scene out in LA?
JT: I hope it hasn’t impacted it too much.
AM: Yeah, I don’t think it’s necessarily impacted the music we make or how it sounds, but we’ve definitely learned a lot about the industry and business and all that stuff…but the music we’ve always tried to just make what we would make. It might be a little less dark in tone.
JT: Maybe.
AM: We’ve tried really hard to not just become an LA band. A lot of the bands we’ve played with out here, we just don’t sound like. I mean even if we like a lot of the same music, we end up just having a different shade of it, which probably has to do with coming from the east coast. I don’t think we’re too LA yet! Yet! [laughs]
AP: Do you think your change in sound has anything to do with going from four band members to just the two of you?
JT: I don’t think we’ve changed in sound that much.
AM: If people think there’s a big difference between our new stuff and our old stuff, it probably has something to do with the engineer that we worked with.
JT: Yeah, we worked with a dope engineer who recorded us.
AM: But in terms of what we like and what we tend to do, we don’t think it’s really changed that much.
AP: A lot of people describe your music as “heavy”– how have you guys maintained that heavyness on the new record and when you’re out there performing?
AM: We’re big fans of playing things slower.
JT: Yeah, we’ll have a record, and we’ll play it live but a lot sludgier, like pulled back.
AM: Yeah, which will make it sound a lot heavier than it actually is. And we just really like fuzz and distortion.
JT: On this new record though, we really tried to do it without relying on a lot of fuzz and distortion, it’s kind of like half-and-half. On the vinyl, it’s kind of more straightforward rock type stuff, and then you flip it, and it gets really trippy.
AP: So I was reading an article on the Phoenix website the other day that compared you guys and your sound to Avril Lavigne– how do you feel about that?
AM: Ha, we’re down! Like whatever.
JT: Ha, yeah I feel like every time you play a show, someone comes up to you and they’re like “Oh you sound like this band” or “Oh you sound like that band”– you know, everyone has a different comparison, and that’s their call.
AM: Yeah, we think Avril’s cool!
JT: Yeah we’re not gonna hate!
AP: No Avril hate here! Seriously though, people do tend to throw around a lot of terms to describe your music, and none of them seem to quite fit. They’ll throw a lot of comparisons out there to 90s alt-rock and even left-field things like Avril Lavigne. So, how would you describe your sound to somebody listening to Dirty Dishes for the first time?
JT: I actually try not to think about it that much, because once you start over-analyzing your own sound, it changes. We try to just make what comes to us naturally and not pick apart the process too much.
AM: And we’re not also huge into the bajillion types of genres and subgenres, so when people ask us, we just tend to say, like “rock”.
JT: Yeah, people have to listen to it and decide for themselves! Whatever they think is cool.
AM: One thing I have noticed people throw around a lot, and we use ourselves sometimes, is the whole shoegaze term– but it’s just because we like those shoegaze bands. A lot of times when I read an article on a band and they call them shoegaze, it’s because there are like a hundred different aspects of their sound that sound like shoegaze- the vocals sound like shoegaze, the guitar sounds like shoegaze, the drums…and while we like all that stuff, when we make a track, we don’t want it to be on everything like that….but anyway. We make weird rock.
AP: Love it.
AM: There was one…what did Vice call us?
JT: Oh! Caveman stomp.
AM: Ha, yeah, it doesn’t really have anything to do with music, but sounds cool, I guess.
AP: Caveman stomp…the next big thing for sure. So, are you guys planning any tour dates to support your new record?
AM: Yeah, we’re gonna do SXSW, and from there we’re gonna go up to Boston, and then back across for about a month…gonna do a tour of the US, I guess…but yeah, nothing too crazy.
JT: Only a little crazy.
AM: Ha yeah, we just got back from a short tour of the east coast in October, which made us wanna go out longer, because it was fun.
AP: So you’re playing a big fest like SXSW alongside some shows at smaller venues in Boston, even some house venues- that’s a wide range. What is your favorite type of show to play? Because sometimes, I’ll have a completely different opinion about a set from a band at a festival versus in a dive bar I’d pop into on a random Tuesday.
JT: I think my favorite shows to play are unofficial shows…like the thing about SXSW is that there are so many unofficial warehouse shows and house shows, and we just like doing that better in general…we hate playing bars and stuff like that, it’s just not the best environment…we’d rather just play a basement.
AM: Yeah, basement house shows, where it’s just more of a free vibe.
Dirty Dishes have a new record due out January 27th via Exploding In Sound. Listen to their new single, “Red Roulette” while ya wait for it.