Title: S/T Label: Rogue Records/ Inertia File Under: A Galaxy Imploding RIYL: Pink Floyd, Grandaddy, The Sunshine Fix, The Eels Forget the Beach Boys references - sure, they're from the same town in California, but the Wilson brothers would have to inject a kilo of ice before they could sound this whacked. Even Brian would have to play in his corner of the sandpit for quite some time. Nope - this is as happy and harmonious as a Filipino maid's ass being set on fire after a hurricane in Georgia. It's absent and floundering and searching and fleeting and drifting and insecure and wanting and wandering, and that's just "Nobody's Perfect", track one, on this special Australian edition. Harmony's for amateurs anyway. "Starting Five" does have bird calls though. You've been warned. And it's almost sing-a-long-able, without drowning in the navel-wanking slurp that stymies the likes of The Flaming Lips. Here, versatility is part Beck-ian sex stumble, small part Becket abstrusity and, as in the case of the self-evident "The Uncertainty of How Things Are", small part reflectionism, as if somehow looking back could make meaning of the waves yet to find their way to the shore. In their liner notes, a DJ makes the claim that Dios Malos are real, "they open up your guts." I'm not sure about claims to authenticity, and I don't claim to understand anyone else's reality, but I do know that in here, "you don't understand a thing I say, so I lie" makes sense. Sometimes that's all you need, especially when Ronnie James Dio gives your band a cease and desist order over alleged similarities in name. That, and the special, very special, of Neil Young's "Birds". Not nearly as retro as the UK press have made it out to be, Dios Malos offers a way through and around, and pisses over Pitchforkmedia's description of them as "the only proper soundtrack to your local schoolyard." I would trade a million years of substandard reviews for 5 seconds of the melancholy understanding and resolution on show here.
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