Transplanted Michiganders sometimes slip up and use the term “party store” in mixed company, forgetting for a moment that few people raised outside the state know that it refers to what’s more commonly—albeit less enthusiastically—called a liquor store. (I wonder how many out-of-staters think people from Michigan are subject to strange and sudden cravings for balloons and streamers.) Mick Collins, a recent emigre to Brooklyn after decades of service in the Detroit music scene, named the new Dirtbombs album Party Store (In the Red), and it’s tempting to imagine he did so precisely because he realized that most of his audience wouldn’t get what he meant by it. After all, the Dirtbombs are a garage band, loosely speaking, and on Party Store they cover classic Detroit techno songs. Collins must have known that at least a few people wouldn’t get what he meant by that.
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Collins made his name in the late 80s and early 90s with the Gories, whose messy, lo-fi punk-blues has proved hugely influential in American underground rock—on a reunion tour this fall, they packed the Empty Bottle for two nights. In the Dirtbombs he’s peppered his output with covers of everything from proggy art-rock to vintage soul (most notably on the group’s breakthrough 2001 covers album, Ultraglide in Black), but a loving homage to techno is a serious lateral move even for a band that’s already strayed far enough from the three-chord stomp of garage to do justice to “Sherlock Holmes,” a 1982 song by archly theatrical synth-pop group Sparks.
Techno is as much a part of Detroit’s musical fabric as garage rock or Motown, with just as diverse an audience. Back when the Detroit Electronic Music Festival (now called “Movement”) was still free, it drew ravers, young rockers, hip-hop heads, middle-aged guys who looked like auto workers, and all sorts of other folks. Seen in this light, Party Store is as much a tribute to Collins’s hometown as the famously cheap video for the Gories’ cover of Machine’s “There but for the Grace of God Go I”—by using some of the Motor City’s most burned-out scenery as a backdrop, the band proudly claimed it as their own. The Dirtbombs covering techno is as thoroughly and profoundly in the spirit of Detroit as radio stations mixing Kraftwerk and George Clinton or garage punks hanging out with ravers.
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