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Artist: The Dalloways

Album: Dirty Money and Filthy Love

Publication: The Bakersfield Californian > Eye Street

Category: Review

Writer: Shellie Branco

Date: 02/06/2008

Website: http://www.bakersfield.com

Review Link: http://www.bakersfield.com/138/story/356322.html

Group takes chances with 'Dirty Money'
BY SHELLIE BRANCO, Californian staff writer

Last Updated: Wednesday, Feb 6 2008 7:40 PM

This is a good time to release a Dalloways album, with the sky often all gray and prone to outbursts and leaving you yearning for a sad-eyed boy or girl who fritters away a woeful income on Victrola records.

The Dalloways will hold a CD release party Saturday at Sandrini's Restaurant and Bar for their new EP, "Dirty Money and Filthy Love."

A college English professor leads this Britpop band of San Joaquin natives, so quite naturally his lyrics evoke lush Gothic romance: cliffs by the sea, salty winds, ice queens.

See "Me and Thomas Hardy" off their latest EP, "Dirty Money and Filthy Love:"

"She's kind of like Tess in that book that takes place in Wessex/A tramp to every fool but me and Thomas Hardy."

Celebrate (or commiserate, whatever the mood) with The Dalloways at the "Dirty Money" release party Saturday evening at Sandrini's Restaurant and Bar, with guests The Filthies and The Sleepover Disaster.

Their latest offering is a bit of a departure, springier and more blissful than past works. The anglophiles will premiere their first music video, the title track, produced by local indie Hectic Films.

Singer-songwriter Gerhard Enns, a Cerro Coso Community College instructor, describes The Dalloways, formed in 2000 under a different name,as "a northern band down south." They identify with The Decemberists of Portland, Ore., and bands such as Stars, who've given Britpop a new home in Canada.

Enns' wife, keyboardist Cortnie Cleary, contributed vocals and co-wrote "I Love You Regardless" and "Didn't Have the Time."

Enns loves the Thomas Hardy classic "Tess of the d'Urbervilles": fallen woman and the dopey man bent on saving her.

In Enns' song, the lovelorn guy packs up for "a Warsaw winter freeze."

"It sounded good and I knew it was really cold, that's where it came from," Enns says, laughing.

They hope to release the full-length album, "Distant Fairs," in late summer and push out another next year.

"Dirty Money" follows 2005's "Penalty Crusade," a melancholy, introspective work heavy on broken relationships.

Enns, 37, wrote the songs for this more upbeat EP and the upcoming full-length album two summers ago after the band's Western U.S. tour, during what he called a summer of inspiration.

"It was such a great streak, 'I can't believe this is happening,'" he says. "I was writing a song a day, 'Oh, here's another idea, what chords am I gonna use?' I ended up finishing the song and recording a scratch version of it for the guys."

They filmed the video for "Dirty Money and Filthy Love" in December. The group turned the basement of Benjamin's Restaurant & Cocktails (the former Xander's Grill) into a speakeasy. They play themselves and a group of bargoers half-heartedly listening to the band.

"We can't wait to see what it looks like," says Cleary, 31. "I'm kinda cringing at the same time, but also excited to see it."

Samples from one of Cleary and Enns' latest obsessions, '60s gothic soap "Dark Shadows," pop up on "Didn't Have the Time." There's an exchange between a couple over the female's need for books and solitude.

Enns croons, "You're like a small town museum/He's not allowed to touch."

"Actually, how I envisioned that is I imagine that person talking to a woman who is not making the most of her youth and her vivacity and beauty and sexuality, 'You didn't have the time, but you lost it,'" he says. "Almost like the male voice trying to persuade the girl or woman to, you know, you can't let it go to waste. It's time and I'm the person."

Drummer Aaron Wall and 31-year-old lead guitarist Ricky Gonzales say this group is a departure from their own band, the Latin/hip-hop/R&B 40 Watt Hype -- a "chimey, spacey" departure, Gonzales says.

Wall, 28, believes the group took more chances than they did on "Penalty Crusade."

"On the last one, we did everything, 'Oh, that's too over the top,'" he says. "We played it a little more safe last time and this time we had more fun. Let's throw in a crazy sound, there's some crazy synth in there ... We weren't afraid to put in a more upbeat, fast song."

Wall produces their albums in his Fresno studio; brother Matt, 33, is the Dalloways' bassist.

The last album, Matt says, was more layered, nuanced.

"I think the new album has these more catchy, singalong kind of hooks," he says. "I think we were trying to go for that, to get more ingrained into the pop sensibilities."

Aaron adds The Dalloways weren't afraid to put robotic talk box vocals on the title track.

"That would never have come close to being on the previous album," he says. "We said, 'Let's make a dance track. If it sounds good, let's just roll with it and not get all, 'Is that a Dalloways song?'"