San Francisco Indie Pop: The Dirty Pictures' Shuttin' Out the World

Recently I stood on the corner of Fifteenth and Valencia Streets in San Francisco and watched the Valencia Gardens public housing project being demolished. It was late February and the sky was an articulated gray. I was forlornly swigging from a bottle of Newman's Own Italian salad dressing, having mistaken it for something harder. There were odd, arresting sounds traveling in the air from the deconstruction taking place across the street: a wrecking ball swung from its crane with heavy slowness and only after it hit the building did the actual sound of it float to my ears.

I was with my now dead, and therefore largely invisible, friend of many years, and we were carrying on a conversation about music.

"I love that sound," I said to my friend, "It sounds just like the beginning of this song called 'Paper Boat' that the Dirty Pictures wrote and recorded."

"The Dirty Pictures? What's that? Who's that?" He asked.

"The Dirty Pictures are these two guys from Ireland, named Mac and Pierce." I responded irritably, impatient that I had to explain all of this to someone who's dead, a ghost, and always looking over my shoulder, so he should know this.

"They came from Ireland just to make music in San Francisco, and they used to have a band called Vocal Disorder, and they just finished all of these songs in Desmond Shea's Analog Alley." I explained helpfully if a bit sourly.

The wrecking ball swung ponderously in the distance and I took another swig of Newman's Own.

"So this album reminds you of a miserable housing projects being torn down?" He asked. "That's weird and sad."

"No, I said, no, it's not. It's evocative and romantic and oddly hopeful. 'Paper Boat' begins with a roomy echoing sound of metal being bent, and it sounds a bit like hearing the impact of that wrecking ball after you actually see it hit. It inverts your sense of time and place. And Pearce's lyrics are all about time and regret and fragility. And plus there's dreamy, airy, plangent guitar loops that remind me of a film going backwards. 'Terrible Beauty' is a wordless groove to found sound. You can hear people in the song talking but you can't hear what they're saying, just whispery tape sounds that go fwup fwup fwup over more delicate guitar parts. There's a song that's sort of about everything, with a million discrete random little things happening in a conceptually conceptless way, called 'Ten Dollars to Get Busy.'"

"You sound like an idiot again."
" I know, again."

Pieces of Valencia Gardens lay strewn across the lot ahead of us, and cars whooshed in the street and whores argued.
"Don't be so melancholy." My ghost said.

"I'm not, I'm actually happy."

The wrecking ball sound floated to us again, and the sky shifted. My friend sighed a little and I took that opportunity to remind him that music redeems us, and that we find music everywhere we are if we listen.