DIRT FARMER? NEVER HEARD OF ’EM…

Have you been missing out on Dirt Farmer?
Short answer: yes. But, truth be told, most of us have been missing out on Dirt Farmer. For a long time.
Dirt Farmer has been a band for awhile, you see. Since October of 1986, to be exact. And although there have been minor tweaks to the Toronto outfit’s physical configuration and major twists and turns in its ever-curious, eternally enthused and endlessly evolving musical output across the intervening decades, at the core of the whole thing for more than 35 freakin’ years have always been the close friendship between Scott Cryer and Rob MacDonald, the symbiotic pop language they speak and a Brill Building-worthy work ethic that’s seen the pair churn out so much material during the regular writing-and-recording sessions it has diligently observed since Day 1 that Dirt Farmer itself has completely lost track of how much good stuff it has lying around in the vaults.
Hence Curio. Dirt Farmer’s eleventh – yes, eleventh – album, this beguiling slab of luminescent lo-fi fizz, fuzz, fog, froth and fun takes its name from the “curio cabinet” or “cabinet of curiosities” in which collectors of weird and wonderful worldly relics, biological specimens and random objets d’art have been known to stow prized oddities in their possession since the “curio cabinet” was given an actual name sometime during the 16th century. None of the songs on Curio date back to the 16th century, of course, but collectively they do represent Cryer and MacDonald’s shared reckoning with the enormous wealth of half-finished and half-forgotten (and sometimes completely forgotten) songs and song ideas they’ve lately (re-)discovered just sitting around in the bottomless piles of tapes and CDRs and digital files and notebook pages and god knows what other shreds and shards of potential greatness Dirt Farmer has accumulated over three-and-a-half decades of doggedly making music together for the pure pleasure of making music together.
“The album is a collection of forgotten songs we found on CDs and USBs from as far back as the ’90s,” says Cryer. “They’re songs that never made it onto an album, for one reason or another, and with some of the tracks we truly have hardly any memory as to when and how they were put together.
“I suppose that will happen when you’ve been writing and recording your faces off continually since the fall of 1986. But oftentimes, we’ll be trying to decide what song to do and we’ll listen to snippets of all these ideas we have – we have tons and tons of little 30-second guitar-and-keyboard ideas – and that’s one of our favourite things to do. The ‘bon-bon song shop’ is always open, so we’ll just sit around and listen to, like, 20 of them and decide ‘Okay, let’s work on those two.’ But we were going through the whole back catalogue after COVID and lockdown and all that in 2022 and there was a lot of ‘Wait, this is really good! Holy shit, I forgot about this! This is great! Why don’t we do something with this?’ So we kept digging and suddenly, hey, we had an album’s worth of songs that were kind of in the same ballpark. A little darker than usual, maybe, but all in the same vein.
“Normally, when we do an album we’ll try to stick to a theme, and all of these songs were ones that never really fit so well. But now it’s all these oddballs put together and it somehow works.”
Take the time to give Curio a curious spin and you, too, will hear how well these 12 “oddballs put together” work … well … together. You will also hear how well Scott Cryer and Rob MacDonald, two oddballs first thrown together by respective intra-band turmoil and fortunate musical happenstance back when “Reagan was still in power,” as Cryer wryly notes, have been religiously honing their highly literate popcraft to the on-again/off-again appreciation of a small, in-the-know “Cult of Dirt Farmer,” but mostly for themselves ever since. To the point that the mere exercise of “rummaging through cupboards and seeing what we had” can accidentally yield an album’s worth of “odds-‘n’-sods” dating as far back as the early 1990s – some re-recorded, some left entirely alone – that frequently gives you the same goosebumps its creators experienced while recording it.
“We have a problem with goosebumps, both of us,” says Cryer. “I’ll put up my arm and Rob will put up his arm and go ‘Uh-huh.’ Both of us at the same time.”
“It’s an evolutionary fear response,” offers MacDonald.
“That’s what it’s about, though: the whole ‘joy’ thing. We’ll hit those ‘Eureka!’ moments when we’re recording or writing where it’s, like, ‘Ah! That’s so good!’ and I can’t even settle down until I go outside to smoke a joint or something to relax a little bit so I can come back in and do some work again. We just love to create. We’ve stayed true to it, just diggin’ it and workin’ at it and slowly, through trial and error, we’ve gotten better at it. Eventually you start getting your craft up.
“We love just doing this. And we’ve never thought that hard about success or ‘making it,’ so it kills me when people say things like ‘Oh, you guys are still trying?’ Trying what? Trying to ‘make it’ and be ‘successful’? Well, that’s always been secondary. We just do it because we like it. Even if we were to win the lottery, this is still exactly what we’d do. It wouldn’t be any different. It’s what we like. Some people work on cars, other people work on songs.”
First single “Robbed My Happiness” – a bittersweet, slightly self-loathing but also slyly self-aware anthem for all of us prone to replaying our latest mistakes “Over again and again / Like a nightmare daydream that wouldn’t end … Just a little bit worse with a darker ending” – reaches a level on the Dirt Farmer “goosebump gradient” rarely attained in the past. It sounds like the Pixies on OMD and MDMA, fizzes like a sugary sparkling-wine beverage that’s become sentient enough to kinda hate itself but with a sense of humour. But there are plenty more tingles where that came from: the cinematic updraft of opener “In Flight”; the Primal Scream-esque snarl and tangle of “Up For Air”; the sinister, electro-shocked motorik lockstep of “Paulie”; and the taut slice-of-life drama “The Airport,” where Cryer throws himself into “Movieland” over an evocative MacDonald instrumental to deliver a breathless stream-of-consciousness narrative about a family being rent apart at the flight gate. There’s levity in the mix on Curio, too, and occasional relief from the demons and doubt and depression often lurking in the shadowy corners of the Dirt Farmer oeuvre. “Cookies & Ice Cream & Milkshakes” is a lighthearted, impromptu collaboration with Cryer’s grandson Miles in celebration of the song’s titular delights, for instance, while “Sunshine Sometimes” is a shimmering, weightless ode to those moments when you know the bottom will inevitably fall out from “the highest of highs” but wish you could feel like this forever anyway.
It’s hard to believe these were all “lost” songs, but this is where relentless productivity and the relentless pursuit of goosebump have taken Dirt Farmer over 37 years: to the point where the magic comes effortlessly. Curio will no doubt inspire the curiosity to dig deeper into the Dirt Farmer catalogue. Trust us when we say it’s a far deeper well than you could ever imagine.
Ben Rayner, May 2023